St. Peter and St. John Healing the Cripple

Albrecht Dürer
St. Peter and St. John Healing the Cripple
engraving
1513

An original Albrecht Dürer engraving.

1513

Original engraving printed in black ink on laid paper.

Signed in the plate with the artist’s monogram upper center, dated in the plate upper left.

A superb 16th century/lifetime Meder “b” impression, printed well before the plate begins to show any signs of wear. The sixteenth and final plate from Engraved Passion.

Catalog: Bartsch 18; Dodgson 68; Panofsky 125; Meder 18a; Strauss 68; Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum 60.

In 1876 the scholar Moriz Thausing, director of the Albertina and professor of art at the University of Vienna, noted that this engraving, considered as the last sheet of the Engraved Passion, is, in fact, outside the scope of a Passion series. Dürer cannot possibly have intended it as the final sheet. It may therefore be presumed that Dürer planned to add further subjects which were never completed. It was left out of most of the old bound copies of the Engraved Passion, and may have been intended as the first sheet of a projected series of the Apostles.