Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in Nuremberg to a goldsmith father, and his two journeys to Italy carried south-of-the-Alps studies of perspective and anatomy back into northern workshops. In 1500, in his twenty-eighth year, he painted this small (67 × 49 cm) panel — the most audacious of his self-portraits.

The composition's shock would have been instantly legible to a contemporary viewer. Frontal pose, symmetrical hair, the right hand raised at chest height — these were the elements reserved in late medieval art for Christ's *Salvator Mundi* image. Dürer represents himself not as an artist but almost as a sacred figure. The Latin inscription above ('I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, painted myself with undying colours at the age of 28') reinforces the gesture. This is not a 'God complex' but a visual claim staked on the Renaissance-Neoplatonist idea that the artist, as creator, bears the likeness of God.

Technically the panel demonstrates Dürer at the height of his control over hair and fur — each strand visibly separate, the whole impression nonetheless dense. The palette is deliberately narrow: browns, blacks, flesh tones, a touch of gold. Against the colour-rich environment of the Italian Renaissance, it shows the disciplined economy of the northern panel tradition.

The painting hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. It is generally taken as the founding moment of the northern self-portrait tradition — the long line from Rembrandt to Van Gogh of the artist looking at himself begins here.