|
His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Renaissance in Northern Europe ever since.
== Legacy and influence ==
[[किपा:Nürnberger Feldschlange.JPG|thumb|right|''The Cannon'', Dürer's largest etching, 1518]]
Dürer exerted a huge influence on the artists of succeeding generations, especially in [[printmaking]], the medium through which his contemporaries mostly experienced his art, as his paintings were predominately in private collections located in only a few cities. His success in spreading his reputation across Europe through prints was undoubtedly an inspiration for major artists such as [[Raphael]], [[Titian]], and [[Parmigianino]], who entered into collaborations with [[printmaker]]s to distribute their work beyond their local region.
His work in [[engraving]] seems to have had an intimidating effect upon his German successors, the "[[Little Masters]]", who attempted few large engravings but continued Dürer's themes in tiny, rather cramped compositions. The early [[Lucas van Leyden]] was the only Northern European [[engraver]] to successfully continue to produce large engravings in the first third of the century. The generation of Italian engravers who trained in the shadow of Dürer all either directly copied parts of his landscape backgrounds ([[Giulio Campagnola]] and [[Christofano Robetta]]), or whole prints ([[Marcantonio Raimondi]] and [[Agostino Veneziano]]). However, Dürer's influence became less dominant after 1515, when Marcantonio perfected his new engraving style, which in turn traveled over the Alps to dominate Northern engraving also.
In painting, Dürer had relatively little influence in Italy, where probably only his altarpiece in Venice was seen, and his German successors were less effective in blending German and Italian styles. His intense and self-dramatizing self-portraits have continued to have a strong influence up to the present, and have been blamed for some of the wilder excesses of artists' self-portraiture, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dürer has never fallen from critical favour, and there have been revivals of interest in his works Germany in the ''Dürer Renaissance'' of about 1570 to 1630, in the early nineteenth century, and in [[German Nationalism]] from 1870 to 1945.<ref name="Bartrum"/> He is commemorated on the [[Calendar of Saints (Lutheran)|calendar]] of the [[Lutheran Church]] with other artists on April 6. The crater Dürer on [[Mercury (planet)|Mercury]] was named in his honor.
His original works are now totally priceless, so much so that even his 19th Century Albertina prints & engravings are changing hands at leading galleries & auctions houses for many tens of thousands of dollars.
== Dürer's theoretical works ==
| 