Altdorfer was elected mayor of Regensburg in 1528 but turned the position down to finish a painting. The painting was The Battle of Alexander at Issus, commissioned by Duke William IV of Bavaria: a vast panoramic canvas showing Alexander's victory over Darius III, with thousands of tiny soldiers beneath a cosmic sky. It is one of the first history paintings to treat landscape as the dominant element.

He was born around 1480, probably in Regensburg, and became a citizen in 1505. He is credited with painting one of the first pure landscapes in oil with no human figures, Landscape with Footbridge (c. 1518 to 1520), a step that no European painter had taken since antiquity. He died in Regensburg in 1538.