Albrecht Dürer

Nemesis (The Great Fortune)

Details

Bartsch 77; Meder 72 II a (of II f); Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum 33 II a (of II f).

Descrizione

Splendid, contrasting lifetime impression, richly inked in the dark areas, with the short vertical scratch under the bridge, with burr in the dark feather tips and with the short horizontal scratch between the drapery and the left thigh as well as with delicate scratches in the upper feathers. The dark mountains effectively and clearly printed, with no signs of wear. With a fine margin around the platemark, lower centre and at the upper left edge, trimmed just inside this.
One of the Nuremberg master’s programmatic main sheets, surpassed in size only by “St Eustachius”.
Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, stands on a sphere in strict profile view, her wings spread out and her robe tails fluttering in the wind, gliding majestically over an alpine landscape depicted in minute detail far below. In her hands she holds reins and bridle and a late Gothic pear goblet, her attributes to punish and restrain the proud and reward the righteous. According to Panofsky’s iconological studies, these attributes derive from Dürer’s knowledge of the poem “Manto” by the Tuscan poet Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), a literary source that the artist knew through his friend and patron Willibald Pirckheimer.
The depiction of Nemesis has been described as a humanist, secular version of the Apocalypse. Indeed, in the spirit of the Renaissance, Dürer found similar images for two seemingly contradictory concepts, Christian revelation and Greek mythology. In both cases, both in the Apocalypse and in the present engraving, the image is divided into two spheres: an earthly and a heavenly realm, in which angels and demons fight and goddesses rule.
Dürer’s own writings show that the goddess of fate was not just a literary figure. In his diary, which he kept in the Netherlands in 1520-21, Dürer inscribed unpredictable events as the workings of “Fortuna”. It is a remarkably secular, modern idea that the course of events is determined not by God, but by such an unpredictable entity. The mountain landscape has been identified as a view of the village of Klausen in the Eisack Valley, one of the few clearly identifiable places in Dürer’s printed work. – The paper minimally darkened along the edges on the reverse and with a faded collector’s notation in brown pen upper right. A faint brown stain in the upper right corner. A tiny cardboard loss in the lower centre of the landscape, otherwise in very good condition.
Rarely so beautiful!

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