Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528). Knight, Death and the Devil, [1513], engraving on laid paper,

Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528). Knight, Death and the Devil, [1513], engraving on laid paper, a rich impression with strong clarity and contrasts, signed & dated in the plate "S. 1513. AD.", measuring 245mm x 189mm. The presence of a very faint horizontal scratch across the head of the Knight's steed conforms to what Angela Campbell deems to be "printed sometime in the middle of the plate's life", i.e. not later (this horizontal scratch disappears almost entirely in later printings). In Remaking Dürer: Investigating the Master Engravings by Masterful Engraving, Angela Campbell and Andrew Raftery examine the same scratch in three examples held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. The scratch in our example is similar to the Frick Collection's copy in Campbell & Raferty's fig. 1b, and not the later/weaker Met impression in their fig. 1c. [Art in Print, Vol. 2, No. 4, Nov-Dec 2012, pp. 15-21]. There is also a bold contrast between the Knight's face and the interior shadow of his helmet, which is lost in later printings: "What is notable is that the deeply engraved line outlining the horse’s underbelly maintains its strength even as the plate degrades. The lines forming the interior shadow of the knight’s helmet, however, are more lightly engraved, and as the plate wears, they lose their depth, resulting in a considerable loss of contrast between the knight’s face and the shadow." [Meticulous Matrices: Building a Chronology of Albrecht Dürer’s Meisterstiche Impressions through the Analysis and Documentation of Microscopic Scratches in His Engraved Plates, by Angela Campbell, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, pp. 100-101]. Some thread margins but trimmed closer in places, i.e. fractionally into engraved areas, slight loss with a depth of 1-2mm at top edge corners, four very short closed tears measuring 5mm to 20mm, slight surface wear at corners, creamy toning to paper, a few tiny marks, pasted onto mount c. 1900, lifting slightly at top edge. [1513]   

We are grateful to the British Museum for allowing us to compare this engraving with three examples in their collections, and for assisting us with our research in their Prints & Drawings Study Room.

❧ One of Dürer's most famous engravings, Knight, Death and the Devil [1513] was one of his three Meisterstiche [Master Prints], the other two being Melencolia I [1514] and St. Jerome in His Study [1514]. "One of the most famous and influential of all Dürer's works." [British Museum, 1868,0822.198]   

"The paper conservator Angela Campbell has recently suggested a new, more objective basis for the assessment of the quality of impressions. In her MA thesis for Buffalo State College, NY, she examined and documented microscopic scratches, evident in all of Dürer's Meisterstiche, that appeared and disappeared from the surfaces of the engraved copper plates over the course of printing. By assessing more than 140 impressions (initially sixteen of the Melencolia I, but later including the St Jerome in his Study and the Knight, Death and Devil) with a 'point-and-shoot' digital camera modified to capture high-resolution magnified images, Campbell was able to establish a relative chronology for them. Her surprising result is that earliest does not necessarily mean best, if the term is meant to describe the most aesthetically successful printed impressions. Indeed, one might reasonably question efforts to define the best impression and instead attempt to understand the differences and variety represented by different impressions. To quote Koehler: 'Even a 'smudged' impression, that is to say, one in which the tinting is still accidental, is not necessarily a bad one, more especially if considered a document in the history of printing'." [New (and some Missing) Perspectives on Dürer, by Armin Kunz, taken from Print Quarterly, March 2014, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 92-97]