Albrecht Dürer, the most gifted painter and engraver of the German Renaissance and Reformation period, was born in Nuremberg. He learned the techniques of engraving in the workshop of his father, a goldsmith, before being apprenticed in 1486 to the realistic Flemish
painter Michael Wolgemuth. Dürer's earliest recognized work was a self-portrait painted at the age of thirteen. It was the first in a series that continued throughout his life, indicative of an introspective self-analysis. By 1493, after a trip to Colmar where he admired the paintings and engravings of Martin Schongauer, his self-portraits indicated a questioning and deeply thoughtful spirit. Dürer went to Venice for the first time in 1494 bringing back with him copies of Mantegna's works and many watercolor and pencil sketches of nature.
The Renaissance ideal of the complete man - the artist as scholar and gentleman - appealed to Dürer who had begun his lifelong search for new ideas, theories, and techniques, and for the solution to the problem of combining realism with abstract concepts. Upon his return to Nuremberg, where he remained for ten years, he devoted himself largely to the making of woodcuts and engravings, refining the woodcut to a degree hitherto unknown and raising it to the highest form of graphic art. His prints were distributed all over Europe and when he returned to Italy in 1505, he was received with respect and admiration. Dürer worked and studied in Venice and Bologna for two years, then returned to Nuremberg where he remained until 1520 when he made a trip to the Low Countries to study the older Flemish masters.
Dürer's paintings are beautifully composed, masterfully lit, and rhythmically strong. He sought a fusion between the spirit of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation in serious, moral, and often symbolic subjects. During his later years he devoted considerable time to writing and illustrating a book on theories of art based on Piero della Francesca's earlier work with perspective. In his final period, as he became more firmly certain of the truth of the idea of the Reformation, his work grew more and more austere in manner and subject. "The Four Apostles", called his "testament," was painted in 1526 and this powerfully classical work seems to reconcile the northern Reformation with Italian classical painting.

Anthony van Dyck, portraitist, was born in Antwerp. A child prodigy, he signed his first portrait in 1616 and was quite well known when he became a member of Rubens' studio before he had reached the age of twenty. Van Dyck became Rubens' favorite pupil and his most valued assistant. Van Dyck could soon imitate the master's style so well that it was impossible to distinguish the work of one from that of the other. In 1620, Van Dyck was invited to England for a short period to paint court portraits. He spent the next seven years in Genoa painting religious themes in a baroque style and studying the Italian masters, especially Titian and the Venetian School. In 1627 he returned to Antwerp where he continued with his religious paintings and completed a series of etchings - brilliant psychological portraits of contemporary poets and artists.
His portraits became more restrained and slightly less brilliant in color as he began to develop his own style. Van Dyck returned to England in 1632 and spent the rest of his life there as court painter to Charles I. During the last nine years of his life, he painted over 350 court portraits. These are executed in an entirely original style characterized by a warm palette, subdued by his use of cold grays and blacks and by skillful draughtsmanship, and combined in a manner that shows the influence of Rubens as well as the mannerist elegance of Titian. These distinguished portraits of an elegant and almost unreal court became the model for later English portrait painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and influenced a vast number of European artists including Gainsborough, Watteau, and Renoir

Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto-the "little dyer"-because his father was a dyer by trade, was born in Venice. Tintoretto, who studied for a short time with Titian and then with Schiavone, admired the color of Titian and the drawing of Michelangelo. Tintoretto's intention was to combine color and drawing to create a new form of art. His personal, dramatic and imaginative painting was to become increasingly Mannerist in style as it grew more and more fluid through the years. He painted portraits, classical or mythological works, and religious canvases using Old Testament themes and subjects. His portraits are restrained and intimate, and glowing with color. His classical works are distinguished by their grace and by the dramatic elements in his poetic conceptions. Tintoretto's inventive genius shows best, however, in the many paintings he created to decorate the Palace of the Dogs, various Venetian churches, the Scuolo della Trinita, and the Scuolo di San Rocco. In these enormous compositions, some of them thirty feet long, he created mysterious scenes full of unearthly light, placed in realistic historical landscapes or elaborate court interiors-all crowded with figures in extraordinary positions, carefully dressed in textured fabrics. In his great canvases on the life of Christ for the Scuolo di San Rocco, Tintoretto's personal vision reached its culmination. In an explosive and passionate expression of the inherent drama of the story, Tintoretto reveals himself as both realist and dreamer. Striking effects are achieved through foreshortened perspective, multiple sources of light, and human figures-exalted, tormented, or struggling with the forces of nature and the spirit. His separation from traditional Renaissance concepts strongly influenced the Mannerists who were to follow.

Johannes Vermeer, the finest genre painter of the seventeenth century, was born and died in Delft. He was the son of a silk weaver and tavern owner who sold art as well as beer, a combination of wares not unusual for Holland. So very little is known about Vermeer that it is only presumed that he was at one time an apprentice to Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt's pupil. Vermeer married in 1653, had eight children, kept the tavern that he had inherited from his father, and painted in his spare time. He attracted very little, if any, attention during his lifetime, and it was not until 1860 that a Parisian art critic published a monograph on Vermeer and brought him to public notice and belated recognition. Thirty-three canvases have now been positively identified as Vermeer's work and it is upon these that his fame rests. Vermeer's cool, perfectly balanced paintings present a world so calm as to be almost breathless. Most of his works present one female figure quietly occupied at some womanly task: making lace, reading, pouring milk, or playing a lute.
Occasionally two figures appear in this intimate world, and their relationship seems without speech as if all the world were under a spell of silence. Vermeer's composition seems extremely simple, but is in fact carefully and intricately laid out. In each work, a careful analysis will show a series of interlocking rectangles filling up the entire surface with volumes rounded by silvery light coming from the side. The world is turned by Vermeer into a geometric pattern, inhabited by people who seem objects is a still life. He employed a soft palette, with blues, golds, and soft reds predominating.