Albrecht Dürer

Dürer treated printmaking as seriously as painting and made it pay. The woodcuts and engravings travelled across Europe in a way panel paintings never could, and he understood the commercial value of a recognisable monogram well before anyone used the word branding.

The technical standard is extraordinary. Melencolia I and Knight, Death and the Devil pack dense symbolism into surfaces built entirely from engraved line. The watercolour studies, a hare, a clump of turf, a young bird’s wing, were made for himself and look startlingly modern.

Two trips to Italy exposed him to Renaissance proportion theory, which he then wrote about at length in German. The self portraits are the other thing people remember: at twenty two, at twenty six, and at twenty eight, this last arranged frontally in a manner normally reserved for images of Christ.