Mulino per trafilatura vicino a Norimberga

Durer painted this watercolour in 1494, when he was about 23 and newly back in Nuremberg from his journeyman years on the road. What he chose to paint is telling. Not a castle or a grand vista but a cluster of plain working buildings on the river Pegnitz, a wire-drawing mill, the kind of half-industrial place most artists simply ignored. He set it down for its own sake, in clear washes of colour, the water and the roofs caught in flat afternoon light. Landscapes made purely as landscapes, with no saint or story attached, barely existed yet in European art. Soon after this he crossed the Alps into Italy, and the watercolours he made along the way are among the first of their kind.