The man who drew the most famous rhinoceros in European history never saw one. This episode explores the life of Albrecht Dürer, born in Nuremberg in 1471 to a Hungarian goldsmith whose family name meant door. We trace his silverpoint self-portrait at 13, one of the earliest surviving children’s drawings in Western art, his apprenticeship with woodcut master Michael Wolgemut, the mandatory four years of journeyman travel that ended with him missing Martin Schongauer by weeks, and the unhappy arranged marriage to Agnes Frey that awaited him at home.

From there we follow his trip over the Alps to Venice, where he absorbed linear perspective and met Giovanni Bellini, and his return to open a workshop that pushed woodcut and copper engraving to levels of detail block cutters had never attempted. We cover the Apocalypse series, his role as Emperor Maximilian I’s propagandist on the 192-block paper Triumphal Arch, the first printed world map and star charts, his German-language mathematics textbook, and the late diary of a bitter trip to the Netherlands where he traded a painting for cloth and likely caught malaria. The episode closes with his uneasy position during the Reformation and the interlocking AD monogram that branded everything he made.

• Why silverpoint cannot be erased and what that reveals about a 13-year-old’s ambition
• How prints functioned as viral mass media compared with paintings locked in palaces
• The charcoal scepter and the ladder: two anecdotes about Dürer’s standing with an emperor
• Historical speculation about Dürer’s sexuality and his letters to Willibald Pirckheimer
• The 1523 Last Supper woodcut and the debate over whether he was a secret Protestant