ALBERT DÜRER : “View of Arco”, 1495 - watercolour on paper, 22.1- 22.1 cm. - Paris, Louvre.

Albert Dürer is the unquestionable genius of German Renaissance painting and one of the most important artists of the whole history of the Art. Audacious and brave, his style combines the sensitivity of the Italian Art -which he had the opportunity to study during his travels to Venice- with the force of the German tradition. But his most outstanding characteristic is his interest and love for the nature, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci, which is evident in watercolours of impressive naturalism like “Hare” and “Grass” (both of 1503, now in the Albertina Museum of Vienna)

The “View de Arco”, despite being an early work (Dürer was 24 years old when he painted it) is one of the most important landscapes of the history of the Western Art. Perhaps for the very first time, an artist faces the real landscape and represents it without any type of artifice. The use of a uniform light, and the also uniform representation of the sky, without any atmospheric element, emphasizes the forceful mountain. It's also interesting to compare this landscape with the previous work by Shen Zhou: the landscape understood as a real element, represented without any artifices in the first example, and the clearly poetic sense shown in the work by the Eastern artist.