If one judges according to the level of both general and scholarly interest, no artist in the history of German culture has achieved greater significance than Albrecht Dürer. As a painter, he was the first of the Northern Renaissance artists whose works stood comparison with those of the Italian masters. It was, however, in the lesser art of graphics--woodcuts, engravings, and etchings--that he achieved international and historical greatness. Perhaps inspired by his early work in the printing industry, or perhaps attracted by the prestige enjoyed by Italian and German humanist writers, Dürer also expended a great deal of energy on his writings. In the sixteenth century he was highly regarded for his work on geometry and perspective, and he still has a considerable reputation for the elegance and creativity of his prose. Erwin Panofsky claims that Dürer's theoretical books constitute the birth...