On Feb. 7, 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote to tell his friend Wilibald Pickheimer that Giovanni Bellini, then Venice’s leading artist, had not only praised Dürer’s paintings but, amazingly, announced his intention to buy one.
Dürer traveled to Venice twice and, on a second visit, he was determined to demonstrate his abilities and those of other artists of the Northern European Renaissance to Venetians. Bellini’s endorsement was enough to convince all but the most biased.
The bias that Dürer sought to counter, and that the great Bellini rejected, has been all too enduring, leading some to see Dürer’s relationship to the Venetian art world as that of a student to a teacher. That was true of his first visit, from 1494–1495, when he completed his training as a painter there after an apprenticeship in his native Nuremberg and advanced studies in northeastern France and the Netherlands.
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