St. John's Church

This watercolor of Albrecht Dürer is among the first landscapes of a specific location known in European art. The perspective is interesting, as it is more of a bird's eye view, and, at the first sight, the houses look rather flat. However, if you look more closely, the houses are recovering their three dimensional appearance. This is because in his early watercolors, the artist's focus was on details, rather than on the overall effect.

Situated in the western part of Nuremberg, the St. John's Church is shown together with the row of surrounding timbered houses, with the hills in the background. An idyllic view of the outskirts of the great medieval city, it is in the same time a fairy tale view, and a precious record for the historian, as the details do not leave anything out of the village-like medieval ambience.

Almost forty years later, Dürer was buried in the graveyard of St. John's Church.