He was able to synthesize German and Italian pictorial styles, and introduced Italian Renaissance aesthetic concepts into Germany. 1 Dürer’s experience in Italy had a profound effect on his art. He was exposed to the ideas of such figures as the architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the painter and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the mathematician Luca Paccioli (1446-1517), and the painter/geometrician Jacopo de Barbari (fl. While in Italy, Dürer studied perspective, geometrical representation, and human proportions. He had already been introduced to Humanist thought before his departure and was acquainted with some Italian paintings and engravings that existed in his native city. After completing a youthful tour of Northern Europe and returning to his birthplace of Nuremberg, he set off for Italy twice, in 1494 and again in 1505.

The present article notes some specific pathological features of these hands and uses computer-assisted tracings to identify their model in an earlier work by the Italian artist Andrea Mantegna.Īlbrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was the first master draftsman in German Renaissance art. The drawing has been the subject of many descriptions and much speculation about the intentions of the artist and the source of the hands he depicts. The popularity of this image is impressive because of its religious connotations and artistic beauty. The image of Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer, painted on an altarpiece in the sixteenth century and destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century, has come down to us in the form of a preparatory drawing on blue-grey paper (Fig. The model for Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands January 25, 2017

Drawings of two closed hands