Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) was a German painter, printmaker and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since. He was in communication with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 he was patronised by Emperor Maximilian I. His well-known works include the Apocalypse woodcuts, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionised the potential of that medium. Dürer’s introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatise, which involves principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions. The Dürer Collection is one of the most important spaces in the Museum, as it contains original Dürer prints.

This collection is one of the largest outside Germany and is comparable to the Royal Collection found inside Windsor Castle. This collection includes the whole set of ‘The Life of the Virgin’ on woodcuts, as well as the whole collection of The Small Passion on copper plates. The signature AD is to be noticed on these engravings, witnessing the authorship of one of the greatest Renaissance artists. Other miscellaneous original engravings depict: ‘St. Jerome in His Cell’, St. Christopher’s, and ‘The Virgin and Child with the Monkey’, to mention some.

Four particularly interesting engravings also make part of the collection, but they are not the work of Albrecht Dürer, but of the Italian engraver and fraudster Marc’ Antonio Raimondi, who copied Dürer’s signature in order to make money from selling fake copies of Dürer’s works. When Dürer found out about this, he immediately sued Raimondi and won the case. Raimondi then had to pay damages as well as remove the etching of AD from his etching plates. Two of the engravings in the collection include the etchings, while the other two do not. This collection was gifted to the chapter by Count Saverio Marchese.