Dürer’s watercolours of Alpine towns and scenery (such as the view of Arco, above) indicate that he travelled to Italy in 1494-5 – a journey that is undocumented and sometimes doubted by scholars. This session explores the evidence for the first journey, undertaken when Dürer was not yet famous. Back in Nüremberg, his increasing success as a printmaker, with works such as the woodcut series The Life of the Virgin and the virtuosic Adam and Eve engraving of 1504, ensured his fame on both sides of the Alps. Dürer returned to Italy in 1505-6, basing himself in Venice, where he mingled with artists, musicians and cognoscenti, his experiences recorded in ten surviving letters to his great friend Willibald Pirckheimer that provide vivid insights into his personality and preoccupations. His crowning achievement in Venice was the commission for The Feast of the Rose Garlands, the altarpiece for the German confraternity, enabling him to display his northerner’s technical virtuosity alongside a newly-acquired Venetian sense of colour. Italy influenced Dürer in other ways, notably his interest in proportion, which culminated in his Four Books on Human Proportion, published posthumously in 1528, the first theoretical work on art to be written in German.