Nuremberg was a really remarkable place to live and be brought up.
Geographically, it was very, very favoured
because it was in the centre of Europe.
Huge numbers of people,
of artists, of materials, of artworks are coming through Nuremberg.
It was also important as a political centre of the Holy Roman Empire,
the coronation garb, allegedly of Charlemagne,
was kept in the castle in Nuremberg.
People brought goods from different parts of Europe
to Nuremberg, but they also brought ideas to Nuremberg.
Nuremberg is really quite unique as a city in Europe at the time,
because it isn't wedded to the artistic guild structures that cities like, say,
Florence or Antwerp were dealing in.
Say, in Antwerp, you had a guild of painters,
you had a guild of sculptors, you had a guild of goldsmiths.
You couldn't make art unless you were part of the guild.
Nuremberg did not have guilds.
And certainly this really affected the way that artists were working.
Artists had more freedom to work across media.
The city council was clearly keen to foster innovation.
And in many different areas,
for instance instrument making, precision instruments that would aid navigation,
globe making, mapmaking and of course, in printing.
This made it much more open and much easier for somebody like Dürer growing up
as a young artist to move from one craft to another.
A powerful artist should not devote himself to one style,
but should be practised in all manner of ways.
That will bring him the understanding to be able to do whichever is asked of him.
We know that from the age of about 10 or 12,
he was working in his father's studio learning the craft of the goldsmith.
He learnt to prepare very fine surfaces,
to engrave very fine in metal.
That level of skill and strength as well
is, I think, something that reminds of him through his life.
And when he was only 13,
Dürer made the most extraordinary self-portrait using silverpoint.
It is one of the very first self portraits of an artist in art history.
And it's the very first artwork in the career of Albrecht Dürer.
The silverpoint technique Dürer has chosen for this self-portrait,
and this is really interesting and fascinating,
is one of the most complicated drawing techniques.
The precision of his line really comes from that time in his teenage years.
I think it was sort of more a matter of bravado, too, with Dürer.
He liked to tackle difficult techniques to show off his ability.
Dürer made drawings of absolutely everything.
He experimented with different techniques throughout his life.
From costume, from fashion, from the natural world,
to studying pieces of grass,
to looking at how people behaved.
It's like today when people take selfies of everything
or take images, snaps, of everything that they see or want to see.
Dürer, I feel would be the sort of person
to whip out a notebook or a sketchbook and draw it.
He's working in silverpoint.
He's working in pen and ink.
He's working in charcoal and white chalk.
Of course, watercolours as well.
Then we have in Dürer's work very spontaneous drawings.
For example, a woman fallen asleep at a table, Mein Agnes.
Agnes Dürer, his wife.
The Mein Agnes sketch, is just so beautiful and it seems to be very off hand.
He's captured her off guard and that is very unusual and very moving.
He was also fully trained as a painter, and he could do everything from painting
very large altar pieces to making very small, delicate sketches.
I think if Dürer hadn't lived in Nuremberg,
it would have been quite difficult for him to cross from being
a goldsmith to being a painter and then being a printmaker.
Nuremberg was one of the absolute centres of this new medium of printing.
I think it's very easy to forget how revolutionary the printing press was.
It was most definitely the Apple Mac of its day.
It allowed people to express quickly ideas,
to change ideas quickly and to move them around Europe.
Dürer took every opportunity that he had during the early part of his career
to find out more about the possibilities of print making.
When he'd completed his period of apprenticeship, he travelled,
which is a standard period of what they call as a journeyman.
And he travelled to Colmar, to visit Martin Schongauer,
which is interesting in itself.
Schongauer was the person who'd been producing
the most extraordinary engravings to date
and Dürer I think really wanted to find out how that was done.
He determined on making his career and his name from prints.
These two mediums were both around at the time
but he determined on pulling them up
to a different level of aesthetic importance.
For which he had a lot of work to do.