Albrecht Dürer, son of the goldsmith Albrecht Dürer the Elder, was the third of 18 children. He began by studying in his father's shop from 1484 to 1486. He then became the apprentice of the Nuremberg painter Michael Wolgemut. Beginning on Easter Sunday in 1490, Dürer began four years of travel, gaining an artistic education, which took him to the southwest of Germany, perhaps also to the Netherlands, although we know only a few of his stops. In 1492 he went to Colmar with the aim of studying with Martin Schongauer, but Schongauer had died on February 2, 1491; he then visited Basel and, in 1493, Strasbourg. After Pentecost of 1494 he returned to Nuremberg, where he married Agnes Frey, the woman his father had chosen for him, on July 7. That fall he left on his first trip to Italy, and in Venice he met, among others, Gentile Bellini and Jacopo de'Barbari, who motivated him to study proportion. He returned to Nuremberg in the spring of 1495 and set up his own studio there. His friendship with the nobleman Willibald Pirckheimer opened doors for him to the Nuremberg humanists. He probably received his first commission for a painting, in 1496, from Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, who had visited Nuremberg during April of that year. In 1498 Dürer published his series of woodcuts illustrating the Apocalypse; two years later he began the series illustrating the Life of the Virgin.

Between 1505 and 1507 Dürer traveled to Italy again, once more stopping in Venice for some time, and probably visiting Bologna, Florence, and Rome. He painted the Feast of the Rose Garlands in 1506 on a commission from the Fuggers and other German merchants in Venice as an altarpiece for Saint Bartholomew. In 1511 his woodcut series the Great Passion and the Small Passion appeared in Nuremberg. Emperor Maximilian I's stay in Nuremberg brought him important commissions, including the Gate of Honor (1515–17) and the Triumphal Arch (1516–18) series of woodcuts, and the marginal vignettes in Emperor Maximilian's prayer book. His master engravings, The Knight, Death, and the Devil, St. Jerome in His Study, and Melancholia, were created between 1513 and 1514. Beginning on September 6, 1515, Dürer received an imperial pension of one hundred florins per year.

He took brief journeys to Bamberg in 1517, to the Reichstag in Augsburg in 1518, and to Switzerland with Willibald Pirckheimer and Martin Tucher in 1519. He made a final long trip from July 1520 to July 1521, to the Netherlands, accompanied by his wife, to confirm the renewal of his pension by Emperor Charles V, the successor to Maximilian I, who was being crowned in Aachen. He took part in the crowning ceremony on October 23, 1520 and was able to settle his petition in Cologne; before and after the event he stopped in Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels. During the course of this trip he met important people such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Lucas van Leyden, Jan Provost, and Joachim Patinier; viewed the works of the great Dutch masters, such as the Ghent Altarpiece by the Brothers van Eyck; made animal studies in front of the tower in Ghent; was received by Margaret of Austria, governess of the Netherlands, in Mechelen; and bought rare specimens, mainly from overseas.

During his final years, Dürer devoted himself primarily to publishing his theoretical writings. His Theory of Fortification was in 1527, and his Four Books on Human Proportion were published posthumously in 1528.