Albrecht Altdorfer

Albrecht Altdorfer (c.1480-1538) was the leading figure of the Danube School and one of the first painters in Europe to treat landscape as a subject worth a picture on its own, with no saint or story required to justify it. He worked in Regensburg, where he also served as a city councillor and architect, and he was a formidable printmaker in both engraving and woodcut. The Battle of Alexander at Issus, painted in 1529, sets a cosmic sky over an army of thousands and is one of the strangest and most ambitious paintings of the German Renaissance. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his work, free to preview and available as originals for printing.