ALBRECHT DÜRER (1471-1528)
ALBRECHT DÜRER (1471-1528)

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from: The Apocalypse

Details
ALBRECHT DÜRER (1471-1528)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from: The Apocalypse
woodcut
circa 1497-98
on laid paper, watermark Crowned Tower (Meder 259)
a fine, strong impression from the Latin text edition of 1511
printing darkly and very evenly
trimmed to or just outside the borderline below, with small margins elsewhere
some minor staining and small defects
otherwise in very good, original condition
Block 398 x 280 mm
Sheet 401 x 290 mm.
Literature
Bartsch 64; Meder, Hollstein 167; Schoch Mende Scherbaum 115

Présenté par

Stefano Franceschi
Stefano Franceschi Specialist

Descriptif du lot

.. and I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
(Revelation 6.8)
The Four Horsemen is arguably the most dramatic and dynamic of all of Dürer's compositions. We see the four horsemen as they burst out of heaven, one after the other, and thunder over the earth. Death is the last to come, grinning triumphantly on his haggard old mare. The mouth of hell opens up below, devouring a 'lord of the earth' - perhaps a bishop or king. No-one is spared, women, men, clerics, monks and peasants all fall beneath their hoofs.
Everything conveys a sense of violence and rupture; the four riders are barely contained within the image as the right borderline cuts through an arrow, the horse's head and the peasant falling in the foreground. Panofsky observed that the three horses in the air are shown at different intervals of their galloping movement, thereby creating the impression of time and continuity, not unlike Eadweard Muybridge's photographic recordings of bodies in motion almost five hundred years later.
The Apocalypse was published by Dürer himself in 1498 and then again in 1511, the first illustrated book ever published by an artist.

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