Dürer was based in Nuremberg for the whole of his life
but throughout his life, he went on quite extended periods of travel.
As part of your training to become a master artist,
you had to go and apprentice and work in another person's workshop,
elsewhere away from your hometown.
So there are lots of artists also travelling around Europe,
but it was rarer to go to Italy.
It's generally thought that in the mid 1490s,
just after Dürer had got married,
he went off on the first of his trips across the Alps.
Many people believe that he went to Venice.
For Dürer, this would have been quite an extraordinary moment, I think.
As Dürer travelled through and over the Alps, down to the plains of Italy,
he made drawings and he made watercolour sketches.
They're extremely beautiful, impressionistic, atmospheric.
The very first realistic landscape drawings in art history.
And we know that in 1505, he set off for Venice again.
A number of portraits survive from his time in Venice
and these really show his interest in the kinds of portraits
being made by artists like Giovanni Bellini and his contemporaries.
And then we also have Christ Amongst the Doctors.
This close up format, this dark background
is used by artists like Mantegna and Bellini in some of their work.
Paintings like The Circumcision, by Bellini in the National Gallery, for example.
We have some fantastic surviving letters
written in Dürer's own hand to his best friend, Pirckheimer, back in Nuremberg,
which really capture some of his experience of being in Venice when he was
well known as a print maker, but not so well known as a painter.
The letters to Pirckheimer reveal at once Dürer's
incredible ego, but also his insecurities.
Dürer seems to be very preoccupied by this idea that
the Italians see him as a printmaker, unable of working in colour.
But he definitely believed that his
Feast of the Rose Garlands had won over all of his critics.
And certainly that painting is a real feast of colours and bravura.
My altar painting is good and the colours are beautiful.
I've shut the mouths of the painters who said
I was good at engraving but had no idea how to use colours in painting.
People treated him as a proper artist,
a creative artist, and not just as a craftsman.
Here I am, a gentleman. At home, only a parasite.
Venice for him was an insight into another way of life
and another way of being a painter.
And that is what we all get from travel, isn't it?
In the last part of his career,
he set off in a completely different direction to the Low Countries.
Dürer left Nuremberg in the summer of 1520 and travelled west along rivers
until he reached the River Rhine.
And that was like the motorway flowing through the middle of Europe
and Dürer made Antwerp, his base there.
But he travelled around quite extensively.
We know an enormous amount about Dürer's visit to the Low Countries
and what he did there and what he made there
because so much survives.
The Netherlandish Journal is an extraordinary and unique insight
to Dürer's day to day life.
And it sort of seems to function in lots of different ways.
We get a really rich picture of the kinds
of people he's meeting with, kinds of places that he's going.
He enjoyed having a good time.
He enjoyed being out in the world.
He enjoyed dancing, gambling, meeting with people.
His fame was so great that he was welcomed and feted wherever he went.
The painters invited me to their hall with my wife and the maid and had set it
all out with silver cutlery and other precious tableware and splendid food.
All their wives were there, too.
And as I was conducted to the table, the company rose to their feet
and lined the way as if some great lord was entering.
An absolutely unique object in Dürer's work is
the famous silverpoint drawing book from the Netherlands.
This drawing book is something like the
illustrated volume to the written volume, the d iary.
Some of the sites that he sees in the Netherlands
are things that he could not possibly have seen at home.
So the zoo which he visits,
some of these exotic animals that he has painted before,
but here they are in the flesh for the first time.
We can also, I think, get a sense of him as a thinker in these writings
and also even as a dreamer.
I mean, he's left us one very, very vivid record he had of a dream,
a very frightening dream about a great flood.
And he also made a little watercolour sketch of the dream as well.
It was as if great masses of water fell from the sky and the first struck
the earth about four miles away from me with such terrifying force,
with a huge roar and throwing up enormous spray as to drown the whole land.
So with that, you really think that you're
inside Dürer's head in the most extraordinary way.