Albrecht Dürer was the greatest German Renaissance artist — painter, printmaker, and theorist who brought Italian Renaissance ideas north of the Alps and synthesized them with the meticulous craft of the German Gothic tradition. He was the first artist north of the Alps to fully adopt Renaissance ideas of self-portraiture as a vehicle for artistic self-assertion: his Self-Portrait at 28 (1500), in which he portrays himself frontally, Christ-like, is one of the most extraordinary statements of artistic identity ever made. His woodcuts and engravings had an enormous influence throughout Europe.
