DURER (Albert)

, descended of an Hungarian family, but born at Nuremberg, in 1471, was one of the best engravers, painters, and practical geometricians of his age. He was at the same time a man of letters and a philosopher; and he was an intimate friend of Erasmus, who revised some of the pieces which he published. He was also a man of business, and for many years the leading magistrate of Nuremberg.

Though not the inventor, he was one of the first and greatest improvers of the art of engraving. He was however the inventor of cutting in wood, which he devised and practised in great perfection, using this way for expedition, as he had a multitude of designs to execute; and as his work was usually done in the most exquisite manner, his pieces took him up much time. For in many of those prints which he executed on copper, the engraving is elegant to a great degree. His HellScene in particular, engraven in the year 1513, is as highly finished a print as ever was engraved, and as hap- pily executed. In his wooden prints too it is surprifing to see so much meaning in so early a master. In fact, Durer was a man of a very extensive genius. His pictures were excellent; as well as his prints, which were very numerous. They were much admired, from the first, and eagerly bought up; which put his wife, who was another Xantippe, upon urging him to spend more time upon engraving than he was inclined to do: for he was rich; and chose rather to practise his art as an amusement, than as a business. He died at Nuremberg, in 1528, at 57 years of age.

Albert Durer wrote several books, in the German language, which were translated into Latin by other persons, and published after his death. viz,

1. His book upon the rules of painting, intitled, De Symmetria Partium in rectis formis Humanorum Corporum, is one of them: printed in folio, at Nuremberg, in 1532, and at Paris in 1557. An Italian version also was published at Venice, in 1591.

2. Institutiones Geometricæ; Paris 1532.

3. De Urbibus, Arcibus, Castellisque condendis & muniendis; Paris 1531.

4. De Varietate Figurarum, et Flexuris Partium, et Gestibus Imaginum; Nuremberg 1534.

The figures in these books, which are from wooden plates, are very numerous, and most admirably well executed, indeed far beyond any thing of the kind done in our own days. Some of them also are of a very large size, as much as 16 inches in length, and of a proportional breadth, which being exquisitely worked, must have cost great labour. His geometry is chiefly of the practical kind, consisting of the most curious descriptions, inscriptions, and circumscriptions of geometrical lines, planes, and solids. We here meet, for the first time, with the plane figures, which folded up make the five regular or platonic bodies, as well as that curious construction of a pentagon, being the last method in prob. 23 of my Mensuration.