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Like so many of his contemporaries, Dürer was haunted by death and guilt and the fear of damnation. He had good reason to be. Death was everywhere. Dürer had seventeen siblings, and only two made it to adulthood. Both his trips across the Alps to Italy—in 1494 and 1505–1507—were partly inspired by the desire to flee outbreaks of the plague in his home town, Nuremberg. “Anyone who is among us today,” Dürer wrote in one poem, “may be buried tomorrow.” This was not a poetic conceit. It was the brutal truth.

The prospect of death also held a special fear, since according to Catholic doctrine death was not the end but merely a new beginning of one’s suffering. The damned burned forever in hell, and even the good had to undergo an extremely long time in purgatory, enduring torments far worse than anything experienced in life. It is no wonder that Dürer worried for the salvation of his father’s soul, even years after the man’s passing in 1502; or that watching his mother’s painful and terrifying demise in 1514—the opposite of the “good death” everyone hoped for—seems to have thrown Dürer into a spiritual and psychological crisis.

A troubled existence such as Dürer’s was the common lot in early-sixteenth-century Germany. Anxiety and despair form the intimate, the subjective, background of the Reformation

As an artistic endeavour, drawing is almost as old as mankind. In an instrumental, subordinate role, it developed along with the other arts in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Whether preliminary sketches for mosaics and murals or architectural drawings and designs for statues and reliefs within the variegated artistic production of the Gothic medieval building and artistic workshop, drawing as a nonautonomous auxiliary skill was subordinate to the other arts.

In the West, the history of drawing as an independent artistic document began toward the end of the 14th century. If its development was independent, however, it was not insular.

Drawing became an independent art form in northern Italy, at first quite within the framework of ordinary studio activity. But with nature studies, copies of antiques, and drafts in the various sketchbooks (those of Giovannino de’Grassi, Antonio Pisanello, and Jacopo Bellini, for example), the tradition of the Bauhütten studio workshop changed to individual work: the place of “exempla,” models, reproduced in formalized fashion was now being taken by subjectively probing and partially creative drawings.