Editing Albrecht Dürer (section)

===Early life (1471–1490)===
[[File:Durer-self-portrait-at-the-age-of-thirteen.jpg|thumb|left|upright|[[Self-portrait]] [[silverpoint]] drawing by the thirteen-year-old Dürer, 1484. [[Albertina]], Vienna.]]

Dürer was born on 21 May 1471, the third child and second son of Albrecht Dürer the Elder and Barbara Holper, who married in 1467.<ref name="BPA11">Brand Philip & Anzelewsky (1978–79), 11.</ref><ref name=":0" /> Albrecht Dürer the Elder (originally Albrecht Ajtósi) was a successful [[goldsmith]] who by 1455 had moved to Nuremberg from [[Ajtós]], near [[Gyula (town)|Gyula]] in [[Kingdom of Hungary|Hungary]].<ref name="heaton">{{Cite book|last=Heaton|first=Mrs. Charles|url=https://archive.org/details/lifeofalbrechtdu00heat|title=The Life of Albrecht Dürer of Nürnberg: With a Translation of His Letters and Journal and an Account of His Works|publisher=Seeley, Jackson and Halliday|year=1881|location=London|pages=[https://archive.org/details/lifeofalbrechtdu00heat/page/29 29], 31–32|author-link=Mary Margaret Heaton}}</ref> He married Barbara, his master's daughter, when he himself qualified as a master.<ref name=":0" /> Her mother, Klinga Öllinger had some roots in Hungary too,<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.hungarianottomanwars.com/essays/albrecht-durer-1471-1528-and-hungary/ | title=Albrecht Dürer (1471 -1528) and Hungary - Hungarian-Ottoman Wars | date=4 May 2020 }}</ref> as she was born in [[Sopron]]. The couple had eighteen children together, of which only three survived. [[Hans Dürer]] (1490–1534), also became a painter, trained under the older Albrecht. The other surviving brother, Endres Dürer (1484–1555), took over their father's business and was a master goldsmith.<ref name="Br16">Brion (1960), 16.</ref> The German name "Dürer" is a translation from the Hungarian, "Ajtósi".<ref name="heaton"/> Initially, it was "Türer", meaning doormaker, which is "ajtós" in Hungarian (from "ajtó", meaning door). A door is featured in the [[coat-of-arms]] the family acquired. Albrecht Dürer the Younger later changed "Türer", his father's diction of the family's surname, to "Dürer", to adapt to the local Nuremberg dialect.<ref name=":0">Bartrum, 93, n. 1.</ref>

Because Dürer left autobiographical writings and was widely known by his mid-twenties, his life is well documented. After a few years of school, Dürer learned the basics of goldsmithing and drawing from his father. Though his father wanted him to continue his training as a goldsmith, he showed such a precocious talent in drawing that he was allowed to start as an apprentice to [[Michael Wolgemut]] at the age of fifteen in 1486.<ref name="BPA10">Brand Philip & Anzelewsky (1978–79), 10.</ref> A self-portrait, a drawing in [[silverpoint]], is dated 1484 ([[Albertina, Vienna]]) "when I was a child", as his later inscription says. The drawing is one of the earliest surviving children's drawings of any kind, and, as Dürer's Opus One, has helped define his oeuvre as deriving from, and always linked to, himself.<ref name="Koerner">[[Joseph Koerner]], ''The Moment of Self-Portraiture in Renaissance Art'', University of Chicago Press, 1993.</ref> Wolgemut was the leading artist in Nuremberg at the time, with a large workshop producing a variety of works of art, in particular woodcuts for books. Nuremberg was then an important and prosperous city, a centre for publishing and many luxury trades. It had strong links with [[Italy]], especially [[Venice]], a relatively short distance across the [[Alps]].<ref name="Bartrum"/>

Dürer's godfather [[Anton Koberger]] left goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher in the year of Dürer's birth. He became the most successful publisher in Germany, eventually owning twenty-four [[printing-press]]es and a number of offices in Germany and abroad. Koberger's most famous publication was the ''[[Nuremberg Chronicle]]'', published in 1493 in German and Latin editions. It contained an unprecedented 1,809 [[woodcut]] illustrations (albeit with many repeated uses of the same block) by the Wolgemut workshop. Dürer may have worked on some of these, as the work on the project began while he was with Wolgemut.<ref name="Bartrum">[[Giulia Bartrum]], ''Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy'', British Museum Press, 2002, {{ISBN|0-7141-2633-0}}.</ref>