Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 8, 2019

The portraits

Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents is the collective name for two late-15th-century portrait panels by the German painter Albrecht Dürer. They show his parents, Barbara Holper and Albrecht Dürer the Elder, when she was around 39 and he was 63, and are among four paintings or drawings Dürer made of the couple. The portraits are unflinching records of the physical and emotional effects of ageing, which Dürer may have intended either to display his skill to his parents or as keepsakes while he travelled as a journeyman painter. His father's panel is considered the superior work and has been described as one of Dürer's most exact and honest portraits. The Dürer family was close, and his later writings show the love and respect he felt toward his parents. The panels, separated since at least 1628, were reunited in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum's 2012 exhibition "The Early Dürer". (Full article...)

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