From approximately 1500 until his death, Dürer was concerned with the theory of art, especially the study of proportions, an important topic for the humanists of the time. Along with his interest in religious themes, Dürer tried to find an answer to the problem of human proportions. He searched for the laws governing perfection in these forms. In 1500, Jacopo de’Barbari (an Italian painter, printmaker and miniaturist) arrived in Nuremberg from Venice, and through him Dürer became acquainted with the theorists of Antiquity, among them Vitruvius (‘Ten Books on Architecture‘, ca. 30-20 BC); de Barbari informed him of the new artistic trends that were then developing in Venice.
At that time, the Apollo Belvedere was being exhibited in Rome, a sculpture that for Dürer’s contemporaries was the essence of the beauty of ancient art; Dürer, who probably knew this work from drawings, was also influenced by it. Prompted by classical art and by Italian examples, he carried out a series of studies on proportion. The final result of these exercises was the brilliant engraving of Adam and Eve (Private collection), in which the Gothic formal language was totally overcome. One of Dürer’s most famous engraved works, it is the conclusion of his four-year study of the ideal proportions of the human body. The engraving, though, is full of further symbolism. The biblical narrative became here an excuse for the depiction of Adam and Eve’s physical bodies as ideal female and male nudes emulating classical sculptures, Adam is based on Apollo Belvedere and Eve on Venus. The accompanying animals elk, hare, cat and ox symbolize the four temperaments (or ‘humors’) into which the human soul divided after the Fall of Man, namely melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic. Likewise, the facing cat and mouse represent the tense relationship between the genders, the parrot above Adam symbolizes Mary as a second Eve, and the ibex in the background atop the rocky outcrops represents the infidels. The rigid pose of the main figures is the result of the conscious application of the rules of proportion, this composition goes in contradiction to former Dürer’s conception of the representation of nature. This dissonance is compensated by the mastery of the engraving technique: nowhere else has he used such a variety of textures in the conscious striving for texture and ‘color’.
After his second stay in Venice (1505-1507), Dürer abandoned the intention of a single ideal of beauty, trying to find perfection in the plurality of possibilities (Adam and Eve, panel paintings, Madrid). Dürer’s pendant panel paintings of Adam and Eve are the earliest known life-size nudes in Northern art. The theme of Adam and Eve became once more an opportunity for Dürer to depict the ideal human figure. These panel paintings reflect the influence of Italian art, they were executed soon after his arrival in Nuremberg from his second trip to Venice. Dürer used a color palette that is both pale and muted, in consequence he did the modeling using purely the effects of light and shadow, thus making us feel that the figures are emerging from a dark background. The bodies of Adam and Eve are noticeably slimmer than those of his engraving of three years earlier (see picture before). Eve, whose skin is whiter than Adam’s following traditional depictions of the female body even since Ancient Egypt, stands in a curious pose next to the Tree of Knowledge. Her right hand rests on a branch and with her left hand she accepts the ripe apple offered by the coiled serpent on the tree. On a small tablet hanging from the branch is the inscription: “Albrecht Dürer, Upper German, made this 1507 years after the Virgin’s offspring.” Adam, for his part, inclines his head towards Eve in a tender gesture also accepting the apple, while stretches out the fingers of his right hand thus creating a sense of balance, the contrapposto of Classical art.
Finished in the year of his death, and the result of 20 years of study, is his Four Books on Human Proportion (1528), which together with his other theoretical writings, Four Books on Measurement (1525) and Various Lessons on the Fortification of Cities, Castles, and Localities (1527), constitute a milestone in art theory.
Around 1495, Dürer used his signature monogram “AD” for the first time in some of his graphic works. From that moment on this very personalized ‘trademark’ was recognized across Europe thanks to both, his copperplate engravings and editions of woodcuts, and became a proof of artistic quality.
In the year 1498 he published 15 wood engravings with the Apocalypse of Saint John. Until then, Dürer had made up to 30 xylographs, which were like a prelude to the grandiose wood engravings that followed. Regarding Dürer’s talent for drawing, Erasmus of Rotterdam said: “What would he not paint? Even what cannot be painted! Fire, rays of light, thunder, lightning and even the invisible, such as senses, feelings, the entire human soul”. From the beginning Dürer planned the Apocalypse to be published as a book and so he edited it simultaneously in German and Latin. The arrangement of the book and its illustrations also followed a special disposition: the pages on the left, with two text columns, don’t correspond to the illustration on the right on the adjacent page, but to the illustration on the back of the same sheet. As a consequence, each sheet was related to each other by its own content and by their correlative position with respect to the text. This was a total novelty at the time, not only due to the fact that Dürer was solely responsible for all the composition, production and editing of the book, but also because of the idea of opposing the complete text by Saint John to its narrative in images. With this work a decisive change took place in the, until then, ‘simple’ wood engraving. Abandoning the traditional technique of the time, Dürer accentuated the effects of light and shadow and qualified the intensities of “color” with scratched surfaces. With the Apocalypse he achieved universal success. For Dürer and his time, the Apocalypse, and especially the prophecy regarding the end of the world, was a contemporary vision. In that time of great disturbances and calamities, all the stories about the darkest omens seemed to come true: collapse of the Emperor’s authority, devaluation of values such as money, insecurity, peasant rebellion, the appearance of plague and syphilis. There was the conviction of a universal punishment.
This 15 woodcut series on The Revelation of St. John (The Apocalypse) executed between 1497 and 1498 in a series of large prints represented with great imagination and power the story of the end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God as told in the Book of the Apocalypse. These engravings came to influence later representations of the subject in northern Europe, especially in France. In the time of Dürer his vision of the Apocalypse became an immediate success. His terrifying visions of the horrors of doomsday, and of the signs preceding it, had never before been visualized with such force and power. The illustrations brilliantly reflect, not only Dürer’s imagination, but the feeling of the public at the time, that was fed on the general discontent with the institutions of the Church which finally broke out during the events fueled by Luther’s Reformation. Many expected these apocalyptic prophecies to come true within their lifetime due to the turmoiled times they were living in.
The woodcut with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse represents the events occurred after the opening of the first four seals (Revelation 6, 1-8), the Horsemen enter the world and bring plague, war, hunger and death to mankind. Dürer’s Horsemen are: the ‘conqueror’ holding a bow, ‘war’ with a sword, ‘famine’ with a pair of scales, ‘death’ riding a sickly pale horse, closely followed by Hades, a Leviathan with its wide open jaws. The group of riders, accompanied by a flying angel, thunders in the stormy skies across mankind and appear not touching the ground. Hades, the monster at the side of the Four Horsemen is swallowing everything in his enormous jaws after Death, the final rider, has passed.
In what is called the “Great Book”, Dürer brought together all his series of prints of the same format that had appeared up to then. In addition to the plates of the Apocalypse, the series consists of The Life of the Virgin (19 prints, plus the title page) and a Large Passion (11 prints, plus the title page), the first made from 1502 to 1511, the second between 1498 and 1510.
In 1511, Dürer put together his series of printed graphics in which the influence of Italian drawing he had experienced during his travels became apparent, particularly in his series related to the Life of the Virgin. This was published in 1511 in book form accompanying poetry by the Benedictine monk Benedictus Chelidonius. With the production of these woodcuts, Dürer ensured a certain degree of financial independence from then on.
before 1511, woodcut, by Albrecht Dürer (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany).
The book on the Large Passion is named after the format of the series (39 x 28 cm) as there’s a “Small Passion” also made by Dürer between 1509-1511 in a smaller size. The whole series on the Passion was published accompanying a poem by the Benedictine theologian Benedictus Chelidonius. This series of 12 woodcuts was executed between 1497 and 1500 (the first seven woodcuts), then it was completed by five additional cuts in 1510. As befitting to a topic like the Passion of Christ, the illustrations by Dürer reflect strong emotions, but also naturalism and human treatment of the subject which were not present in Late Gothic depictions of the Passion. Dürer considered the Passion to be the subject most worthy of representation in pictorial art, and he portrayed it five different times during his life time, with a a sixth version unfinished due to his death.
In the last years of the 15th century, great concern and interest was manifested in events, miracles and supernatural signs that heralded the end of the world according to the opinion of the time. Times of unrest and poverty usually bring with them eschatological thoughts. Dürer’s work reflected a prolonged preoccupation with miraculous events. While working on the Apocalypse, he painted the delicately finished, miniature-like work of Saint Jerome in the wilderness (London). On the obverse we see an idyllic, Nordic-looking landscape, with a festoon of mountains bathed in morning light with some dramatic rock formations, probably based on sketches that Dürer had made of the quarries near Nuremberg; St. Jerome is kneeling at the center as a penitent. In his right hand he holds the Bible that he translated into Latin, his left hand holds a stone that he is using to beat his chest in penitence. He seems to ponder beyond the small crucifix stuck into the tree trunk in front of him. Wearing a long and loose blue gown, his red mantle and cardinal’s hat lie beside him on the ground. Behind him rests his faithful lion that he befriended after he removed a thorn from its paw. The whole scene is lit by a dramatic evening sky. The reverse of the panel was executed with a very different technique and traced with large nervous brushstrokes: we witness the emergence of a comet in a sea of light. This image is probably derived from woodcuts of comets published in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. Dürer painted a similar object in his engraving of Melencolia I that he made 20 years later.
More impressive is his watercolor from 1525 known as “Dream vision” (Vienna), therefore made during his last years. The watercolor and its explanatory text describe an apocalyptic dream Dürer had on the night of 7-8 June 1525. The dream vision is one of terrifying realism: the drawing shows a wide landscape with scattered trees and what it seems a small city. An enormous column of water furiously pours down, spreading out near the ground flooding the surroundings, while other smaller columns of water start to fall from the heavens. Dürer had this dream during a period of great religious uncertainty with the dawn of the Reformation, at the time many people feared that a flood would destroy the world. Below the watercolor Dürer wrote a description of his dream. He wrote about it: “it fell with such fury and noise that I woke up frightened and trembling all over.”
According to Dürer, one of the main missions of art is the description of Sacred History. In it lied the inspiration for most of his creations. His preferred themes were the passion of Christ and the lives of the Virgin and saints, using engraving as the predominant method for his work. Through engraving, Dürer’s art achieved great influence on his time. Marian themes dominate his pictorial work, covering a long period, from around 1495, with the panels of The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (Munich and Dresden) and with the Haller Madonna (around 1498), to The Madonna and Child with the Pear, from 1525 (Florence).
Dürer’s earliest known altarpiece, The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin was probably commissioned by Frederick the Wise for the church at the palace of Wittenberg. This altarpiece was originally very large, nearly two meters high and three meters wide. The right half, that represented the Seven Joys of the Virgin, is now missing and only the left half with the Seven Sorrows survives. The central panel of the surviving portion depicts the grieving Virgin after the Crucifixion has happened, with a golden sword about to pierce her heart, a symbol of her agonizing pain caused by the sufferings of Christ, which are narrated on either side in scenes from the Passion. As a symbol of her virginity, Mary wears a white cloth and a heavy blue garment, the color that traditionally has been referred to her status as the Queen of Heaven. This central panel at some point was sawed and reduced in size by 18 centimeters at the top. Around the central panel with the Virgin are seven smaller panels depicting with great detail scenes from the life of Christ.
Commissioned by the noble family Haller von Hallerstein, from Nuremberg, the Haller Madonna shows clear influences of Italian painting, bringing some resemblance to those painted by Giovanni Bellini. Dürer regarded Bellini with high esteem, considering him as the great example of a painter. Dürer’s Madonna departs from the ideal of pure beauty portrayed by the Venetians and has a chubby complexion with Nordic features, while the Child also exhibits a blunt nose and giant cheeks. If we look at Dürer’s engraving of Adam and Eve (see picture before), we can notice that this Child is holding the apple in the same position and gesture as Eve does. The Child seems to try to hide behind his back the forbidden fruit that brought humanity to sin and that he is destined to redeem. To the right we see the rich marble wall of the family’s home; to the left, we are faced with an outdoor landscape with woods, hills and a castle. This painting is absolutely beautiful both, in the treatment of color and in composition and form.
Madonna and Child with the Pear is one of Dürer’s last works, and was done at the end of a period in his life in which he journeyed from one side of Europe to the other in the incessant search for new stimuli and new knowledge. We can notice his change of style in the new treatment he gave to the forms, which in this painting are almost round and arranged tightly in the composition space with absolute confidence, we can also appreciate this in the play of complementary curves created by the movement of the arms and hands of the Child, and in the composition of the faces of the Madonna and Child. Although the painting is of small size, the Madonna is depicted in a half-bust almost filling the space of the composition; the child is seated, though it is unclear on what. This Madonna is the last and most stylistically mature version of the Virgin painted by Dürer. As we said, the Madonna is frontally depicted, holding a pear in her left hand of which we see only her fingers. Her long blond hair falls on her shoulders almost symmetrically to the right and left. The necklines of the white blouse and red dress are also nearly symmetrical to one another and make contrast with her facial features that are softly curved. Her gaze towards the Child reflects meditation and pensiveness, and that of the Child (who appears fully clothed) is fixed and immobile, his right hand grasps the edge of the Virgin’s cloak, and his left hand closes around an unidentified flower.
Dürer executed few large works made for altarpieces. The Paumgartner Altarpiece (Munich), probably made between 1498 and 1504, is of a perfection rarely surpassed in the fusion of primitive German and Italian art forms. Here, Dürer freely tested pondered forms and presented a scene of elaborate perspective effects with the desire to merge the profane with the divine. Saints Eustace and George officiate at the doors of the altarpiece. This triptych was commissioned by the brothers Stephan and Lukas Paumgartner for the Church of St. Catherine in Nuremberg. When opened, the altarpiece reveals a central Nativity scene framed by the images of said saints George with a dragon (to the left) and Eustace (to the right), both dressed as knights and holding identifying banners. The two saints had the features of the Paumgartner brothers (Stephan on the left and Lukas on the right). The central panel depicts the Nativity set in an architectural ruin. Although traditionally a night-time scene, Dürer sets it in a space brightly illuminated by a large sun in the sky. The composition, mostly occupied by the ruins of what seems to be a palatial building, draws the eye of the spectator towards the archway to the right. The minuscule body of Christ is almost lost in the composition, while surrounded by little angels. Peering out from behind the Romanesque columns on the archway to the right are the ox and the ass, while opposite them on the left side are the faces of two shepherds also peering out. Two other shepherds step up into the courtyard in the background, their red and blue clothes echoing the colors of those wore by Joseph and the Virgin Mary. In the distant sky, an angel descends to reveal the news of the birth of Christ to another pair of shepherds that appear tending their flock on the far hillside. The small figures at the bottom corners of the central panel are the Paumgartner family with their coats of arms: on the left behind Joseph are the male members of the family, while on the right besides Mary are the female members.
In 1494, during the stay in Nuremberg of the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, Dürer met who was to be his biggest buyer until his death. At his request it was made in 1504, the panel with the Adoration of the Kings (Florence) for the church of the castle of Wittenberg, a good example of Dürer’s pictorial work; colors have an intense luminosity, enhanced by the metallic shine of gold used on the panel and associated with the landscape of ruins of the background, a suitable set for the whole scene. The four main characters are in the foreground, and their doubtless statue-like quality would be unthinkable without the study of Italian models.
In this panel, Dürer framed and delimited the compositional space by an architectural setting composed of arches in perspective. The three kings seem to have arrived from the back and after climbing a slightly elevated terrace. A single figure, sharply foreshortened if we notice his tiny feet, followed them, the upper half of his body more visible to us; he looks Oriental, wears a turban, and carries a large bag probably containing precious gifts for baby Jesus. The Madonna, as is traditionally portrayed, is dressed in dark blue with a white veil covering her head. She is holding out the baby to the eldest king who offers the child a gold casket, which he takes with his right hand. This and the Oriental servant’s gesture of putting his hand in his bag are the only actions that we witness in the scene. All the other characters are motionless; they look straight ahead or sideways. The way the background was composed is tremendous: the clear sky with the cumulus clouds chasing one another; the Nordic city, climbing up the mountain side; the road going into the archway where horse riders stop. Everything and everyone are represented with much imagination and variety of color. In the far distance to the right we see a lake and a boat. Dürer’s imagination and diversity of forms, colors and gestures extend in the depiction of the kings, their facial features, garments, and gifts they bear. Dürer was passionately devoted to the study of animals and plants, which he often reproduced faithfully from life. We find some here as well, all with a symbolic meaning: in the foreground, to the right, a stag beetle symbolizing Christ; the broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) seen directly behind, whose healing properties were much appreciated at the time, is a reminder of the spilled blood of Christ; in the foreground, to the left, on the millstone beside the carnation, we see a small beetle surrounded by a few butterflies, the ancient symbol of the soul, which here may be a symbol of the resurrection.
Between Dürer’s two trips to Venice, his contacts with Italy had not been interrupted and at the end of the summer of 1505 he returned there, where he stayed until January 1507. This time, already a famous artist, he visited Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, and maybe also Rome. During his stay in Venice, he painted for the church of Saint Bartholomew, then the oratory for the German merchants’ guild, the magnificent painting of the Feast of the Rose Garlands (Prague), for which he would prepare several study cartoons in the Italian manner. The Virgin with Child, accompanied by Saint Dominic, is seated under a canopy in front of a landscape: Humanity prostrates at her feet, represented from the Pope and the Emperor to the artisans, in order to receive the rosary, whose devotion was recommended by the Dominican Order, hence the privileged situation of its patron saint. This painting was deeply admired by the whole city. Dürer recounted, in a letter dated September 8, 1506, that even the Doge and the Patriarch of Venice had admired his painting.
Dürer prepared 21 drawings for this work that took him from 7 February until the last half of April in 1506. By 25 September, the work was completed. Most of the characters in the painting haven’t been successfully identified, with the exceptions of Dürer self-portrait (to the right and holding a paper with an inscription), the Emperor Maximilian I, the architect Hieronymus of Augsburg who is recognizable in the far right by the square he holds, and a citizen from the city of Speyer named Burckhard who is the fourth figure form the left. St. Dominic, traditionally wearing black over white, is the saint standing to the left of the Madonna, he was prominently portrayed since the institution of the rosary is attributed to him. The Madonna wearing a rich blue gown seats enthroned in the midst of a field, beneath a green canopy that cherubs hold up with ribbons. Other cherubs on little clouds hold a crown of precious stones above her head. At her feet kneel the pope (left) and the emperor Maximilian I (right). The Madonna places a garland of roses on the head of the emperor, while the Baby Jesus places another on the head of the Pope. St. Dominic, mirroring these gestures, in turn crowns a bishop. Behind the pope and the emperor, the patrons are arranged symmetrically. Other cherubs descend upon them with rose garlands. In the center of the painting, seated in front of the throne, an angel plays a lute similar to those Giovanni Bellini painted in his enthroned Madonnas. In the background, behind Dürer’s self portrait, we see a typically German landscape developing in front of our eyes. Dürer portrayed himself confidently looking directly at us. The paper he holds includes a text unusual in the Italian painting of the time: it shows not only the time of production (five months), but next to his the artist’s own name and his nationality (germanus). This details all seem to be placed to make Dürer’s work to be distinguished from that of his famous Venetian colleagues of the time who held him in high regard.
Simultaneously, Dürer was working on the composition of the painting of Christ among the Doctors (Madrid), a work for which he also drew numerous study cartoons, all elaborate and grandiose. The theme derives from the Gospel of St. Luke (Luke 2, 41-52): Jesus, still a young kid, visits Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem where he engaged in an arduous debate with the learned Jewish doctors (or scribes of the temple). Traditionally, this scene was portrayed with the characters inside the conventional temple setting, but Dürer made here a daring composition and gives us a close-up, intimate view of the discussion, with the faces of six doctors crowding around the young Jesus. Some of the elderly doctors have grotesque faces, probably influenced by similar ones drawn before by Leonardo da Vinci, an appear arguing and gesticulating. Christ, a calm boy of 12 with lush golden curly hair, quietly gestures with his fingers to make a point. See how Dürer contrasts Christ’s youthful hands with the twisted fingers of the grotesque old man with the white cap. On the bookmark at the bottom left of the panel, Dürer wrote that this painting was indeed ‘the work of five days’. Despite this statement, Dürer carefully worked before in the composition of this painting, and so he prepared several careful studies for it (see the picture below). Although of a small size, Christ among the Doctors shows a more spontaneous brushwork than the Feast of the Rose Garlands, which was painted simultaneously and took over five moths, the brushstrokes here were applied broadly and fluidly.
On his return from Italy, he was commissioned by the wealthy merchant and mayor of Frankfurt Jakob Heller with the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, (center panel of the Heller Altarpiece). Unfortunately, this panel burned in a fire in the 18th century; therefore, only in copies we can see the evolution of Dürer’s art towards simpler and grander forms. From this altarpiece, only the central panel depicting the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin was executed by Dürer. This panel shows great vigor in the treatment of color as well as in the ampleness and wealth of the clothes. St. Peter and St. Paul, in the foreground, turn their backs to the expectator thus opening the view and leading the eyes towards St. Thomas and the landscape behind the group. The doubting St. Thomas bows down over to peek at the inside of the emptied sarcophagus in the foreground while touches the linens that were wrapping the body of the Virgin. The other apostles stand or kneel around the sarcophagus. In the distance, on the landscape, Dürer himself stands holding the explicative tablet, his gaze fixed straight ahead. The background extends far in the distance, towards a lake surrounded by hills, and sprinkled with buildings. Up in the sky, in a semicircle of clouds, accompanied and held by a flock of cherubs, the Virgin rises toward the Eternal Father (right) and Jesus Christ (left), as they wait to crown her. Each detail of this panel was carefully studied by Dürer as 18 detailed preparatory drawings still exist. One of them, the famous Praying Hands (Vienna), are a preliminary study for an apostle (the one wearing a bright pink mantle). This image, removed from their original context, has been viewed as an autonomous work of art and since it has become highly popular. In the 19th and 20th centuries numerous reproductions of the Praying Hands have embellished the walls of middle-class homes as an embodiment and symbol of piety.
In the year 1511 he painted on behalf of the wealthy metal trader of Nuremberg, Matthäus Landauer, and for this city hospital, the panel of The Adoration of the Trinity (Vienna). The composition is inspired by Saint Augustine’s vision of the communion of saints and the adoration of the Holy Trinity by all of Christendom. The work recalls, by its layout, the Dispute by Raphael (Vatican). In the center of the panel at the top is the Trinity. God the Father is shown as emperor, holding Christ on the Cross and surmounted by the dove of the Holy Ghost. Around the figure of God are two rings of angels. The crowd of martyrs on the left is led by Mary, all holding palm fronds, and the group of Old Testament prophets and kings on the right is led by St. John the Baptist. Near the base of the painting are the slightly larger figures of the living, led by the Pope (wearing a light blue tiara) and the Emperor (with a golden crown). The grey-haired figure of Matthäus Landauer, the donor, is depicted on the left, being welcomed into the group by the hand of a cardinal. The landscape at the very bottom of the panel, representing the earthly realm, stretches into the far distance. On the right, a lone figure stands, the artist himself. His hand rests on a panel which reads: ‘Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg made this 1511 years after the Virgin.’ As all the altarpieces by Dürer, this was also a carefully designed work.
In 1526, Dürer bequeathed to the Council of the city of Nuremberg, two paintings commonly called The Four Apostles (Munich), representing Saint John, Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint Mark; in both, he annotated verses of the New Testament from the translation by Martin Luther. With this gesture he intended to counteract exalted fanaticisms and certain sects, especially iconoclastic currents. Dürer had to witness how fellow students and friends were accused of blasphemy and expelled from the city. With the gift of the paintings of The Four Apostles, he intended to create a warning ‘symbol’ in those times. Dürer, like all his contemporaries, placed his hopes in the person of Martin Luther —to whom he gave, on his way through the city in 1518, a selection of his prints— and during his stay in Antwerp, on the trip to the Netherlands (1520-1521), he was able to get a hold of Luther’s writings, decisive for the separation of the Church during the Reformation. Dürer also criticized the profane ostentation of the papacy of his day, but he desired nothing more than a moral reform of the laws then governing the Church.
As it was common in many cities in Italy to grant the town hall with a work of art that would serve as an example of good government, Dürer provided his native city with one of his works purposefully made to this end. The council gratefully accepted the gift, and consequently hanged the two works in the upper government chamber of the city hall. John the Evangelist stands on the far left, holding an open New Testament from which he is reading. Behind him is Peter, holding the golden key to the gates of heaven. On the other panel, standing at the back, is the Evangelist Mark, with a scroll. On the far right is Paul, holding a closed Bible and leaning on a sword, a reference to his subsequent execution. The Four Apostles also function as a warning. To this end, inscriptions were affixed to the bottom of the panels, which reproduced biblical passages from the recent translation of the Bible done by Martin Luther (1522). The first line of both are references to the Apocalypse of St. John, but the essential content represent a reproach to the secular powers not to conceal the divine word within the seductive human interpretation. The Four Apostles probably represented Dürer’s personal religious beliefs through the inscriptions. These two large panels are Dürer’s last known oil paintings, finished when he was 55. They represent his spiritual testimony and are among his most powerful works.
The Artistic Adventure of Mankind 