The Renaissance in Germany is an unusually bright outbreak of creative genius at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, which is the most dramatic and short-lived period of Renaissance culture, characterized by a complex interweaving of old and new, national and Italian, secular and religious, ideas of the Reformation and humanism. This extraordinary synthesis was most vividly embodied in the work of the outstanding painter Albrecht Durer (1471-1528).