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The Copyright of these Works is registered pursuant to Statute

5 and 6 Vic. c. 45.

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PREFACE.

LBERT DURER, the author of the Pictures in this book, was one of the earliest and most famous of the Artists of Germany. His early life, like that of many most eminent Artists, was passed in the workshop of a Goldsmith. He was the son and grandson of a goldsmith, but he left his father's craft in his sixteenth year, to become a Student of Painting under Michael Wolgemuth, and a most indefatigable Artist in all branches of Art up to the time of his death. We find his well-known monogram on Paintings, Sculptures, Engravings, Etchings (which process he is said to have invented),

Drawings on Wood, Ornamental designs of all kinds. In the practice of all he obtained an eminence, which places him at the head of the Artists of his own country, and in the first rank of his Italian cotemporaries, Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, &c. Like these great men, Albert Durer was not only a Painter. He left treatises on Fortification, Mensuration, and the Proportions of the Human Body, the chief part of which have been published oftentimes; and his original manuscripts of them, fancifully written in party coloured inks, exist in the British Museum. His journals, &c. show him to have been in communication with most of his great cotemporaries; Raffaelle, Mabuse, Lucas van Leyden, Quintin Matsys, Melancthon, Erasmus, Luther, bequeathing to us portraits of the two last. The Paintings of Albert Durer are by no means common in this country. One of

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