1471
Nuremberg
Born on 21 May. Nuremberg, a free imperial city, gathered printers, goldsmiths and merchants — the milieu in which printed image would become the vector of Dürer's fame.
Dürer's life is more than a chronology: it is the emergence of an artist-author in a city of print, at the crossroads of Rhenish, Italian and imperial exchange.
1486–1490
Family training and workshop
Apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut: illustrated chronicles, woodcut, crowd composition. The young Dürer learned the rigour of a reproducible line.
1490–1494
Journeyman travels
Colmar, Basel, Strasbourg. These years built the Rhenish network and the awareness of a master able to sign his work.
1495
Opening the workshop
Definitive return, marriage to Agnes Frey, AD monogram. The workshop structured painting, drawing and print as complementary activities.
1498
Apocalypse and first prints
Publication of the woodcut cycle: immediate success across Europe. See The Four Horsemen.
1505–1507
Travels in Italy
Venice: colour, antiquity, Bellini. The second stay nourished portraits and a theory of beauty.
1508–1514
Artistic maturity
Naturalist studies, the Large Passion, then the master engravings of 1513–1514: Knight, Death and the Devil, St. Jerome, Melencolia I.
1512–1518
Maximilian I
Imperial commissions, decorations, engraved Triumph — the artist in the service of power.
1520–1521
Journey to the Low Countries
Journal, Antwerp, Erasmus. See Travels.
1525–1528
Final treatises and death
Treatise on measurement, fortification, proportions; death on 6 April 1528.