Indicies : Designers : Albrecht Duerer Albrecht Dürer)

Germany’s most famous painter of the Renaissance era. Lived in Nuremberg, but traveled at least once to Venice.

In addition to his painting, Dürer was very interested in the proportions of the human body, perspective, and letterforms. He tried to develop a system to discover the geometric building blocks of the Roman alphabet (both the classical Roman uppercase letters, and the lowercase Textura letters (a variety of Blackletter).

While his books on letterforms are beautiful, they were not influential in the course of typographic development. Dürer, however, did play an enormous role in the development of European typography: together with Johann Neudoerffer the Elder, he worked at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to create the Fraktur style of type (another Blackletter variety), in 1517.