His father, who was delighted with Albert’s industry, took him from school as soon as he had learned to read and write and apprenticed him to a goldsmith.  “But my taste drew me toward painting rather than toward goldsmithry.  I explained this to my father, but he was not satisfied, for he regretted the time I had lost.”  Benvenuto Cellini has told us how his father, in like fashion, was eager that he should practise the “accurst art” of music.  Duerer’s father, however, soon gave in and in 1486 apprenticed the boy to Michael Wolgemut.  That extraordinary beautiful, and, for a boy of that age, marvelously executed portrait of himself at the age of thirteen (now at Vienna) must have shown the father something of the power that lay undeveloped in his son.  So “it was arranged that I should serve him for three years.  During that time God gave me great industry so that I learned many things; but I had to suffer much at the hands of the other apprentices.”

When in 1490 his apprenticeship was completed Duerer set out on his Wanderjahre, to learn what he could of men and things, and, more especially, of his own trade.  Martin Schongauer was dead, but under that master’s brothers Duerer studied and helped to support himself by his art at Colmar and at Basle.  Various wood-blocks executed by him at the latter place are preserved there.  Whether he also visited Venice now or not is a moot point.  Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo dei Barbari—­the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to study the proportions of the human body—­a study which henceforth became the most absorbing interest of his life.

“I was four years absent from Nuremberg,” he records, “and then my father recalled me.  After my return Hans Frey came to an understanding with my father.  He gave me his daughter Agnes and with her 200 florins, and we were married.”  Duerer, who writes so lovingly of his parents, never mentions his wife with any affection; a fact which to some extent confirms her reputation as a Xantippe.  She, too, in her way, it is suggested, practised the art of cross-hatching.  Pirkheimer, writing after the artist’s death, says that by her avariciousness and quarreling nature she brought him to the grave before his day.  She was probably a woman of a practical and prosaic turn, to whom the dreamy, poetic, imaginative nature of the artist-student, her husband, was intolerably irritating.  Yet as we look at his portraits of himself—­and no man except Rembrandt has painted himself so often—­it is difficult to understand how any one could have been angry with Albert Duerer.  Never did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression.  In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation.  His fondness for fine clothes and his legitimate pride in his personal beauty reveal themselves in the rich vestments he wears and the wealth of silken curls, so carefully waved, so wondrously painted, falling proudly over his free neck.