Dürer's Predecessors
Dürer’s hometown, Nuremberg, became a major center for book production in the second half of the fifteenth century. Some of the region’s leading manuscript illuminators worked there, and between 1469 and the end of the century, more than 1,000 editions printed with moveable type were published within the city. The nature of Dürer’s artistic achievement is shown by comparison with the works of his fifteenth-century German predecessors, including the engraver Martin Schongauer (d. 1491), and Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519), Dürer’s teacher in Nuremberg.