Sunday 31 July 2011

The walkway street food market in Nuremberg

The walkway street food market in Nuremberg by Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528)
Source: Wikipaintings

I've always liked Albrecht Durer's work.  It might be because he favours drawing and line.  I was delighted to discover recently some of his landscape works on wikipaintings - including this particular work The walkway street food market in Nuremberg (click this link to see a much larger version of this image)

Albrecht Durer was born in Nuremburg in 1471 and became one of the most famous painters of the Northern Renaissance.

Given that Nuremburg was his home town, this must have been a very familar scene for him - and this painting is presumably an early example of "paint what you know".

What I like about is that it's done in pen and ink with a colour wash - which is a style for recording a scene which I very much like.

The town lies either side of the Pegnita River and this walkway street food market was presumably a Nuremburg equivalent of the shops on the Rialto bridge in Venice.

What's interesting about Nuremberg is that about 90% of the old town was destroyed by strategic allied bombing during the second world war.  However the town has been rebuilt to reinstate its appearance prior to WW2 and the covered bridges appear to still be a feaure of present day Nuremberg's Ald Stadt. You can see a large map of Nuremburg's Ald Stadt (old town) today on Wikipedia

How to see more of Durer's landscapes and cityscapes
  • If you click on the cityscape or landscape links in the Wikipaintings Durer page you'll see a range of thumbnails of the works he produced.  
  • The paintings are organised in chronological order within each genre
  • Click a thumbnail and you'll be taken to the page for that landscape - which then tells you more about the painting

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