Icons: Albrecht Durer Was an Arist on the Move
A New Exhibition Explores the Artistic and Personal Impact of Travel on the Renaissance Master

Oh the places he went! Albrecht Dürer was perhaps the most accomplished artist of the Northern Renaissance, the creator of stunning paintings like "Self-Portrait" and exquisite prints like "Melancholia I." He was also, as a new exhibition reveals, an inveterate traveler whose journeys influenced his ambitions, his art and his impact. "Dürer Was Here: A Journey Becomes Legend," opening July 18 at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, Germany, commemorates his visit there in October 1520. A smaller version of the show will be on view at London's National Gallery in November.

Christ Among the Doctors

Born in 1471, Dürer first left his hometown of Nuremberg, Germany, around 1490. Over the next three decades he visited places in present-day France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. He crossed the Alps to visit Italy twice, possibly leaving home to escape the plague. Wherever he went, he viewed art, mixed with other artists, courted potential clients, angled for commission, sold his engravings and further polished his glowing reputation. He sketched people, their dress and their surroundings, creating images he used in many later works. He gambled and took dancing lessons.

Other artists of Dürer's era traveled, but he alone extensively documented his sojourns in journals, drawings and letters. His account chronicling his trip to the Low Countries from July 1520 to July 1521 is particularly rich in details, listing amounts paid for inns and meals, tips bestowed to ease his way, and gifts both given and received. "As a glimpse into the life of a great artist of that time, this one-year trip is a fantastic opportunity to understand the economic, social and artistic realities of the era," said Jonathan Bober, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Dog Resting

With 190 historical documents, drawings and paintings, the Aachen exhibition tells the story of those 12 months. Dürer based himself in bustling Antwerp, but he went to Aachen to see the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. Using a new sketchbook, he drew the site of the ceremony, "Aachen Cathedral and the Katschhof" (1520), several town scenes and animals, like his realistic "Dog Resting" (1520). His main motive wasn't artistic: Charles's predecessor, Maximilian I, had ordered Nuremberg to pay Dürer a pension of 100 guilders a year for life, and the artist wanted to make sure the new emperor would renew it.

Charles soon granted his wish and Dürer, back in Antwerp, started making many excursions. He went to Zeeland to see a beached whale and to Brussels and Ghent, where he visited zoos and saw lions for the first time, making four drawings of one. He visited the famous Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eyck brothers and journeyed to Bruges, where he viewed Michelangelo's marble "Madonna."

Peter van den Brink, exhibition curator and director of the Aachen museum, said that Dürer made about 130 drawings on these travels. The exhibition displays about 55 of them, including one of the artist's innkeeper in Antwerp, whom he paid 11 guilders a month. "I wanted as many as possible, because I wanted to tell stories around his progression on the trip," Mr. van den Brink said.

St. Jerome

Painting on the go was harder, and while Dürer created as many as 22 pictures in this period, most were small and only five survive. The exhibition includes "St. Jerome in His Study" (1521) and "Portrait of Bernhard von Reesen" (1521), a merchant who traveled with Dürer to Zeeland in December 1520. That portrait and Dürer's "Portrait of a Man, Possibly Rodrigo Fernandes de Almada" (1521)—a Portuguese friend whose many gifts to Dürer included two green parrots—anchor a climactic oval gallery hung with 12 portraits by Dürer's contemporaries, including Jan Gossart's "Portrait of a Man" (ca. 1520-25) and Michael Sittow's "Portrait of a Man with a Rosary" (ca. 1520), all of which he probably saw.

This gallery also links Dürer's art to his time in Italy, more than a decade earlier. In Venice, Dürer adopted the Italian style of portraiture: sculptural, head-and-shoulder portrayals set against a plain background. He hewed to this style, ignoring most innovations of his Northern contemporaries.

Madonna and Child

The London version of the exhibition has a broader title, "Dürer's Journey's: Travels of a Renaissance Artist," and will also cover the artist's travels to Italy. Dürer's artistic exchanges there were more mutual. He befriended Giovanni Bellini, for example, who had been inspired by Dürer's engravings; in turn, as Dürer's "Madonna and Child" (1496-99) demonstrates, he gave up his elaborately detailed style in favor of Bellini's simplified forms, half-length format and highly saturated colors.

Another example is the striking "Christ Among the Doctors" (1506), whose story illustrates Dürer's bravado. Because he was best known for his black-and-white prints, some jealous Venetian artists carped that he could not paint in color. Annoyed, Dürer stopped work on an altarpiece to depict the young, wise Jesus amid his elders. He inscribed it "opus quinque dierum," a boast that he had created the painting in five days—probably an exaggeration.

These exhibitions do more than take visitors along on Dürer's travels: They also humanize one of the great artists in the Western art canon.