Albrecht Dürer

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A rider in full armour threads a narrow gorge on a great horse, his dog at his heel; Death on a pale mount holds up an hourglass and a goat-faced devil trots behind, but the knight looks straight ahead toward the city on the hill.

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Self-Portrait. At twenty-six, after his first Italian journey, he shows himself half length under an arch, in rich gloves, hat nearly touching the top of the panel: the face of a young man certain of his rank among artists, painted like no northern face before it.

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The Rhinoceros. The Indian beast in riveted plates, a small twisted horn on its back, drawn from a description and a sketch of the animal landed at Lisbon in 1515; the woodcut that stood for the species in Europe for generations, though Dürer never saw one.

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Saint Eustace. The hunter kneels to a stag bearing a crucifix between its antlers while his horse and hounds wait; an engraving of about 1501 whose landscape and animals are cut in such detail that the whole wood reads like a world.

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Adam and Eve. The pair of panels made at Nuremberg once he was back from Venice, the first nudes at full human scale in German painting; the bodies built on Italian proportion, the faces still wholly his own.

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Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle. The earliest of his painted self-portraits, made at twenty-two: long hair, a tight green jacket, and a sprig of thistle held up like a pledge, the flower then read as a promise of faithfulness to a bride.

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Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents. His mother near thirty-nine and his father at sixty-three, set down without one softening stroke; among the most exact and unflinching records of age a painter ever made of his own family.

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Emperor Maximilian I. The emperor in fur cap and heavy gold chain against a pale ground, painted after the sitting at Augsburg in 1518; the patron who kept Dürer at a pension, given the plain face of a tired, sharp man.

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Adoration of the Trinity. The whole heaven in tiers above a crowded earth, painted in 1511 for a Nuremberg merchant's chapel in a house that sheltered twelve aged artisans; the sum of everything Dürer could hold on one panel.

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Adoration of the Magi. The kings and their train crowding to the Virgin under a ruin, painted for Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg; the panel where northern detail and Italian calm first sat down together, a picture Wölfflin called the first fully lucid painting in German art.

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Portrait of a Venetian Woman. A bust-length young woman against flat black, her patterned dress and pale skin set off by soft waves of reddish hair; painted on his second Italian journey in 1505, one of the society portraits that trip paid for.

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Mary and Child. The Virgin with the child on her arm before a plain green ground, the two faces close together, drawn in the firm, gentle line of his Nuremberg years.

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Avarice. An old woman counting coins, her blond hair and noble bone structure at war with glazed eyes and a mouth of two teeth; a small panel of 1507 on the back of a portrait, warning that youth and fortune both run out. It hangs, in the literature, beside Melencolia among his meditations on vanitas.

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Christ Among the Doctors. The twelve-year-old Christ boxed in by four elderly scholars, every face a separate study in suspicion or wonder; painted in Venice in 1506 and, by its own inscription, done in five days alongside the great Rosary altarpiece.

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The Dream of the Doctor. A scholar sunk in sleep while a nude woman stands over him and a small devil fans the air toward the pair; a moral riddle cut in pure line, of the kind his engravings made their own.

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St Jerome in the Wilderness. A double-sided panel of about 1496: the hermit with his lion on one face, and on the reverse a strange blazing body in the sky that may be a comet or a meteorite actually observed, decades before such things were admitted as sightings.

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Portrait of Johann Kleberger. A Nuremberg merchant of 1526 in three-quarter profile against a stone slab and open sky, the head carved out of the panel like a Roman medallion; one of the last portraits, ancient in air and modern in eye.

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Lot and His Daughters [reverse]. The old story of Lot and his daughters painted on the back of a portrait panel, the biblical scene turned away from the wall, so that a painting hides as much as it shows.

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Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand. A hillside of executions painted in 1508 for Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who chose the subject from relics in his own collection; the painter steps into the middle of the scene to sign it himself.