All of Dürer's works in three mediums are reproduced in this edition. Among them are his most famous works, Knight, Death and Devil; Melencolia I; and St. Jerome in His Study. Also included are portraits of his contemporaries, including Erasmus of Rotterdam and Frederick the Wise, as well as six engravings formerly attributed to Dürer.

Rediscover the drawings of Albrecht Dürer, one of the most prominent Renaissance artists, known as an incomparable painter and draughtsman with a keen eye for the natural world. During his lifetime, Dürer found tremendous success as a painter and printmaker, taking commissions from prominent figures such as Frederick the Wise and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. His drawings and studies reveal his interest in human proportions, anatomy, and perspective. Featured in this book are Dürer's drawings from the Albertina Museum's preeminent collection including family portraits, studies of animals and plants, and studies of the human body. This book showcases more than 100 of Dürer's drawings including Hare, Self Portrait at the Age of 13, and Melencolia I, along with paintings and prints. Featuring scholarly essays and beautifully reproduced works, this book shows the reader not only how important Dürer's drawings are to his own oeuvre, but also how he helped drawing become an appreciated medium in its own right.

Though most famous for his engravings, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was also a master painter and draftsman whose work exemplifies the spirit of German art. This overview of Durer's entire oeuvre is an ideal introduction to his work.

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

"In 1591, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published his Della simmetria dei corpi humani, an Italian translation of Albrecht Dürer's Four Books on Human Proportion. While Dürer's treatise had been translated earlier in the sixteenth-century into French and Latin, it was Gallucci's Italian translation that endured in popularity as the most cited version of the text in later Baroque treatises, covering topics that were seen as central to arts education, connoisseurship, patronage, and the wider appreciation of the studia humanitatis in general. The text centres on the relationships between beauty and proportion, macrocosm and microcosm: relationships that were not only essential to the visual arts in the early modern era, but that cut across a range of disciplines - music, physiognomics and humoral readings, astronomy, astrology and cosmology, theology and philosophy, even mnemonics and poetry. In his version of the text, Gallucci expanded the educational potential of the treatise by adding a Preface, a Life of Dürer, and a Fifth Book providing a philosophical framework within which to interpret Dürer's previous sections. This translation is the first to make these original contributions by Gallucci accessible to an English-speaking audience. Gallucci's contributions illuminate the significance of symmetry and proportion in the contemporary education of the early modern era, informing our understanding of the intellectual history of this period, and the development of art theory and criticism. This is a valuable resource to early modern scholars and students alike, especially those specialising in history of art, philosophy, history of science, and poetry."--Publisher's website.

Previous editions published under title: Albrecht Deurer.

Issued in connection with an exhibition held March 24-June 9, 2013, National Gallery of Art, Washington.