Introduction

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer. Born in Nuremberg and originally trained as a goldsmith, Dürer would become one of the greatest artists of the German Renaissance, widely respected and admired by both his contemporaries and modern art historians. Dürer traveled throughout his life, meeting other artists and craftsmen from across Europe.

This page contains two of his writings, each of which includes images and togglable clarifying annotations created by me. Both of these works are also available (sans my annotations) online via Project Gutenberg, but I find reading longer texts on their site nonideal and so have decided to host the works here as well.^[1]

Records of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries compiles a set of letters Dürer sent to his humanist friend Willibald Pirckheimer during his second trip to Italy from 1505-7 with a diary kept during his trip to the Netherlands from 1520-1.

Of the Just Shaping of Letters is a short treatise on the construction of letters by means of geometric shapes and measurements. It is an excerpt from a longer work of geometric theory for the artist: Vnderweisung der Messung, mit dem Zirkel vnd Richtscheyt, published in Nuremberg in 1525; the entire work, as far as I can tell, has never been translated into English.