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The Small Woodcut Passion

The Small Woodcut Passion by Albrecht Dürer

Medium

Woodcut and letterpress in black, with additions in pen and brown ink on cream laid paper, in modern full red calfskin, sewn on raised bands, with blind fillets around inner-edges of boards, blind lines and gold titling on the spine, and hand-sewn silk headbands

Dimensions

15.9 × 11.9 cm (6 5/16 × 4 11/16 in.)

Classification

woodcut

Department

Prints and Drawings

Museum

Art Institute of Chicago

Accession Number

75052

Rights

Public Domain

About this artwork

Opposite Dürer’s woodcut The Crucifixion (folio C viii verso), a sixteenth-century viewer honed in on this sacred event. He inscribed several lines personalizing his experience of the print below the monk Benedict Cheledonius’s text, where there was room: In Cruce pendentem / rogo te Deum omnipotentem / ut mihi des mentem / te semper amare volentem (I ask you, omnipotent God, hanging on the Cross, that you grant me a mind wishing always to love you). This seems like an intimately pious, original...

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 ...

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