Hercules at the Crossroads (Jealousy)
c. 1498
Medium
Engraving in black on off-white laid paper
Dimensions
Image: 32.3 × 22.2 cm (12 3/4 × 8 3/4 in.); Plate: 32.5 × 22.5 cm (12 13/16 × 8 7/8 in.); Sheet: 34.4 × 24.2 cm (13 9/16 × 9 9/16 in.)
Classification
engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
21452
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Renaissance humanists were fascinated by antiquity— its mythic heroes, surviving architecture, coins, and sculpture. Noblemen even demanded that the historians inflating their family trees make them stretch all the way back to Hercules and other demigods. Historical figures were occasionally given mythological nicknames, like the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who was sometimes known by his supporters as the “German Hercules.” These two Hercules prints by Albrecht Dürer fed the fascination w...
About the Artist
Albrecht Dürer · 1471–1528
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) stands as the preeminent figure of the Northern Renaissance and arguably the most influential artist in the history of printmaking. Born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471, and dying in the same city on April 6, 1528, Dürer revolutionized the status of the artist in Northern Europe, transforming printmaking from a commercial craft into an independent fine art and establishing ...