The Sea Monster

Details

Bartsch 71; Meder 66 a (from k); Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum 21 a (from k).

Description

Magnificent, strong and crisp lifetime print, with the watermark required for this early condition, which suggests a print from 1495 to 1502. A lifetime print with this early watermark has not been offered on the art market for decades. Drawing the landscape warmly and strongly, before all traces of smudging and before the horizontal through the last mountain or through the monogram. Cut just inside the plate edge, the border line mostly visible. A bearded sea monster, half human, half fish, holds a turtle shell with a jawbone as a weapon. He carries his prey, unimpressed and clothed only in a drapery, tightly in his arms out to sea . Her beauty shines more brightly in contrast to this bizarre creature. The depiction of the abduction of a naked young woman by a sea monster is drawn from a mythological source, but the iconography has not yet been interpreted conclusively. Dürer himself titled the sheet in his diary of the Dutch trip as a “sea miracle”. The female nude manifests his desire to develop a new, rationally based and measurable ideal of beauty in the spirit of the Renaissance (cf. R. Schoch p. 74). – With inconspicuous horizontal creases in the centre, backed on the reverse in Japanese laid paper. The lower left corner professionally reattached. Minute retouches to the lower and upper edges. The upper left corner inconspicuously backed. Otherwise in fine, good condition. Very rare in this condition and print quality!