Albrecht Dürer is widely considered to be one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance. In his engraving Melencolia I (1514), an enigmatic scene unfolds, in which a brooding angel sits near geometrically hewn stones, a demon flies overheard, and a sleeping hound wedges itself between tools and scientific instruments. “Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it,” he once mused. “Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.” Born on May 21, 1471 in Nuremberg, Germany, Dürer was trained as an engraver from an early age and began receiving regular commissions by his ...