This portrait is one of Dürer’s great creations. It offers a three-quarters view of an unidentified person who occupies most of the canvas. Dürer places him in front of a dark background that bears some touches of blue. The light enters from the left, bringing out the features of the face and hands and projecting the sitter’s shadow onto the background at the right, where the date and th
Dürer made this panel and its companion, Eve (P02178) upon returning from his second trip to Italy in 1505. Both works constitute an effort to synthesize what he had learned there, in search of a balance between Italian and Germanic approaches that would permit the ideal perfection of the human body. Thus, the choice of a biblical subject here is mere pretext. Dürer´s knowledge of the cl
In the same year that he published the Apocalipsis cum figuris, Dürer painted himself as a gentleman, dressed in light toned clothes and looking his best. He wears an open black and white doublet with a striped cap in the same colours, an undershirt trimmed with gold and a silk cord of blue and white threads holding up a grey-brown cloak that falls over his right shoulder. Dürer has shea
Like the painting of Adam (P02177), represented on a separate panel, Eve´s unstable posture, her rhythmical movements and her affected gestures are sometimes interpreted as a return to earlier models of Gothic art, instead of what they really are, a foretaste of Mannerism. The solidity of the two bodies, Eve´s slightly Gothic curves -the prototype of a Germanic Venus- and Adam´s fascinated express