It would have been gift enough to the world if Albrecht Dürer had only been an artist.

The third of eighteen children, he was apprenticed first to his goldsmith father and later to the most highly regarded painter in his hometown of Nuremberg. From both Albrecht learned a variety of skills, artistic and technical: silver point, engraving, pen, brush, gouache and watercolor, woodcuts. As a young man he toured throughout Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, learning ever more in his field. After a return home for an arranged marriage to a woman named Agnes Frey—not a happy union—he set off again to see the great centers of the Renaissance in Italy: Venice, Padua, Mantua, and Cremona. The journey south made such an impact on young Albrecht that his return is credited with the birth of the Renaissance in northern Europe. When opportunity arose he returned to Italy and stayed from 1505 to 1507.

Once settled back again home in Nuremberg, Albrecht became extraordinarily productive and by the time of his death had produced “more than six dozen paintings, more than a hundred engravings, about two hundred and fifty woodcuts, more than a thousand drawings, and three printed books on geometry, fortification and the theory of human proportions.” His good friend Pirckheimer composed a epitaph befitting the high regard in which the artist was held: Quicquid Alberti Dureri mortale fuit sub hoc conditur tumulo, “Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb”…