Albrecht Durer

Reniassance Master - perhaps the Greatest "German" artist of the Renaissance era. Also the most important of the Renaissance Mathematicians - Father of Descriptive Geometry.

Albrecht Durer was the third son of Albrecht Ajtos and Barbara Holfer. He was one of their eighteen children. The Ajtos family came from Hungary. The name Ajtos means "door" in Hungarian. When Albrecht Ajtos senior and his brothers came to Germany they chose the name Türer which sounds like the German "Tür" meaning door. The name changed to Dürer but Albrecht Dürer senior always signed himself Türer rather than Dürer.

Durer began his career in the Imperial Free City of Nürnberg with his father, a Hungarian goldsmith who had emigrated to Germany in 1455. Despite his goldsmith origins, however, by 1484 Durer had already begun painting. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgumut and began to work with woodcuts and copper engravings as well. His mastery of perspective came through his study of geometry and mathematical theories of proportion. Fascinated by mathematics, Durer traveled extensively. Durer began to explore the "mathematical secrets of art" and delved yet more deeply into the study of mathematics.

After returning to Nürnberg, Dürer's health became still worse. He did not slacken his work on either mathematics or painting but most of his effort went into his work Treatise on proportion. Durer expressed his theories on proportion in The Four Books on Human Proportions. Although it was completed in 1523, Dürer realised that it required mathematical knowledge which went well beyond what any reader could be expected to have, so he decided to write a more elementary text. He published this more elementary treatise, in four books, in 1525 publishing the work through his own publishing company.

This treatise, Unterweisung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheit, is the first mathematics book published in German (if one discounts an earlier commercial arithmetic book) and places Dürer as one of the most important of the Renaissance mathematicians. Dürer's remarkable achievement was through applying mathematics to art, he developed such fundamentally new and important ideas within mathematics itself and gave rise to the field of "descriptive geometry."

Source: The Hungary Page