Albrecht Dürer's House

Listen for a moment. Behind you, the cobbles of the square climb gently toward the castle rock. In front of you stands a tall house with a sandstone base and dark timber beams crossing pale plaster above. The wood is old and slightly uneven. The windows are small, set in neat rows. This is the house where Albrecht Dürer, the most famous artist of the German Renaissance, lived and worked for nearly twenty years.

Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471. His father was a goldsmith who had come from Hungary. The young Albrecht trained first in that trade, learning to work with fine tools on hard metal. Then he moved to the workshop of a local painter, Michael Wolgemut. That early training with the engraver's tools matters. It explains the sharp, precise lines that later made his prints famous across Europe.

The house itself is older than its most famous owner. It was built in the fifteenth century, in the late Gothic style. The lower floors are solid sandstone, the typical red and yellow stone of this region. The upper floors are half-timbered, which means a wooden frame filled with plaster. Many Nuremberg houses once looked like this. Very few survive today, and that makes this building a rare survivor from the medieval city.

Dürer bought the house in 1509. By then he was already well known. Here is a detail many visitors miss. According to records of the sale, the previous owner had been the astronomer Bernhard Walther, a wealthy merchant who studied the stars. So before it became an artist's home, this building was connected to the scientific life of the city. For a man as curious about mathematics and measurement as Dürer, it was a fitting place to live.

Dürer lived here with his wife, Agnes Frey, until his death in 1528. They had no children. Agnes was not simply a housewife. She helped to run the business side of the workshop. She travelled to fairs and markets to sell her husband's prints. In a time when an artist's income could be uncertain, this trade in printed images gave the household steady money.

And those prints were the real source of Dürer's fame. A painting exists in only one place. A woodcut or an engraving can be printed again and again, then carried across the continent by merchants. Dürer understood this earlier than almost anyone. His works travelled to Italy, the Netherlands and beyond. On many of them he placed his monogram — a large letter A with a smaller D tucked beneath it. It became one of the first artist's trademarks in European history.

Some of his best-known engravings date from his years in this house. Knight, Death and the Devil was made in 1513. Melencolia One followed in 1514. That second image shows a winged figure surrounded by tools, a magic square of numbers and a strange stone shape. People still argue about its meaning today. The questions it raises are part of why it has lasted five centuries.

Now a gentle warning, so you are not surprised inside. Most of Dürer's original paintings are not here. His famous self-portrait from 1500 hangs in Munich. The small watercolour of a young hare is kept in Vienna. What you will find inside are rooms furnished in the style of his time, along with copies and changing exhibitions of graphic art. The museum is about the life and the working world of the man, more than a gallery of his masterpieces.

One of the most interesting rooms is the reconstructed workshop. Here you can see how prints were actually made. There are presses, inked plates and carved woodblocks. At times, staff demonstrate the old techniques. Watching paper pressed against an inked surface, you begin to understand how slow and careful this work was. Every line in a Dürer engraving was cut by hand into copper, in reverse.

The house has had a long life as a place of memory. In the nineteenth century, Nuremberg began to celebrate Dürer as a symbol of German art. The city took over the building, and it became one of the earliest museums anywhere dedicated to a single artist. During the Second World War, bombing destroyed much of the old town around it. The house was damaged, but it was not lost. Careful restoration brought it back.

Step back outside and look at the square around you. This is the Tiergärtnertor square, named after the old gate in the city wall just nearby. On warm evenings the square fills with people sitting on the cobbles and on the steps of the surrounding houses. Look across the square and you will notice a large, rather odd bronze hare. It is a modern sculpture, a playful and slightly unsettling tribute to Dürer's small, gentle watercolour.

Above you, the castle rises on its sandstone rock. From the higher paths you can look down over the steep roofs of the old town. Try to picture this view in Dürer's day. Nuremberg was then one of the richest cities in the Holy Roman Empire, the loose union of German lands ruled by an emperor. It was a city of merchants, printers, scientists and craftsmen. Dürer grew up surrounded by people who made things with great precision.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look at the house once more. Notice how the heavy stone holds up the lighter wooden frame above. Notice the small panes of glass and the steep roof. Five hundred years ago, a man sat behind one of those windows with a burin in his hand, cutting fine lines into copper. As you walk away down the slope, those same lines are still travelling the world.