St. Anthony
Albrecht Dürer
St. Anthony
Engraving
1519
An original Albrecht Dürer Engraving.
1519
Original engraving printed in black ink on laid paper (bearing no watermark as is typical of early impressions such as this one).
Dated and signed with the artist’s monogram in the plate on a tablet lower left.
A superb 16th century/lifetime Meder “a” impression, printed before the appearance of the scratches in the sky to the left of the cross.
Catalog: Bartsch 58; Dodgson 91; Panofsky 165; Meder 51a; Strauss 89: Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum 87
Dürer recorded in his diary of a trip to the Low Countries in 1520-21, that he gave away impressions of “St. Anthony” as a present on 6 occasions. It is one of the few Dürer engravings in horizontal format. St. Anthony (c.250-350AD) was the first Christian monk. He lived in Egypt and loved poetry, piety and scholarship. The traditional rendering of this saint shows him in the desert beset by fantastic creatures, a scene which allows the freest reign to an artist’s imagination. But Dürer chose to picture him in a melancholy mood, in a setting where the scene dominates the composition. The background is a cityscape taken over from an entirely different subject, the drawing “Pupila Augusta” which Dürer had laid aside many years before. The composition is almost cubist in concept. The contours of the saint and scene correspond. During this year Dürer experimented with ‘cubist’ figures and faceted faces, which like “St. Anthony” seem to have been put together block by block.
