German art
Printmaking by woodcut and engraving was already more developed in Germany and the Low Countries than anywhere else, and the Germans took the lead in developing book illustrations. The woodblocks were often (on loan, or) lent to printers of editions in other cities or languages. The greatest artist of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, began his career as an apprentice to a leading workshop in Nuremberg, that of Michael Wolgemut, who had largely gone away from painting so that he instead could work with [and profit] from the new medium. Dürer worked on the book, the Nuremberg Chronicle, published by his godfather Anton Koberger, Europe's largest printer-publisher at the time.