How To Read Paintings: Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait

A complex description of religious piety and artistic self-assertion

Self-portrait (1500) by Albrecht Dürer. Oil on lime wood. Alte Pinakothek museum, Munich. Source Wikimedia Commons

Albrecht Dürer was 28 when he painted his self-portrait. The inscription in the top-right of the painting tells us so: “ I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg have portrayed myself in my own paints at the age of twenty-eight.”