Knight, Death and the Devil

Both of his two other Meisterstiche (Melencolia I and St. Jerome in His Study ) contain a skull-like object, a dog, and an hourglass, and all three are identical in size. The engraving is heavily indebted to the Gothic style. Many of the forms blend into each other. The outline of the horse is built from a series of interlocking curves, while the knight's chin is woven into the line of his helmet. These two central figures are surrounded by a tangled mass of branches, harness and hair, which according to art historian Raymond Stites contrast with the relatively solid figure of the knight and his horse to set them as a "tangible idea in a world of changing forms". The man is shown looking doggedly straight ahead; he does not allow his line of vision to be interrupted or distracted by the demons beside him. According to Elizabeth Lunday the "skeletal figure of death stands ghostly pale against the darkness of a shadowy crag, while the devil, a multihorned goatlike creature, skulks amongst straggly tree roots." Death is shown with his horse in the left background and rendered without nose or lips in lighter shades than the other figures. Erasmus' book builds on the well-known biblical metaphor of the Christian soldier in Ephesians 6:13-17 "put on the full armour of God." The engraving draws from Psalm 23; "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil". Knight, Death and the Devil is dated and signed by the artist; the bottom left of the tablet is scribed "S. (=Salus/in the year of grace) 1513." ==Interpretation==

It is generally believed that the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, portrayal of the knight's Christian faith, and also of the ideals of humanism, with allegorical elements. Art historian Erwin Panofsky said of Erasmus (Dürer's future friend): In Panofsky's interpretation, the dog is a symbol of faithfulness to God. The engraving bears similarities in mood and tone to one of Dürer's other great prints Melencolia I. The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter noted that the composition followed soon after Dürer's beloved mother had died a painful death. Austrian 19th-century art historian Moritz Thausing said that Dürer had created Knight, Death and the Devil as part of a four-work cycle, each designed to illustrate one of the four temperaments. According to Thausing, the work was intended to represent sanguinity, hence the "S" engraved in the work. Dorothy Getlein said the knight resigned, and his facial features are downcast. His gloomy posture is in contrast to the sturdy look of his horse. While his armor may protect him against the surrounding demons, the skull on a stump is held in front of the horse and the fall of the sand held by death in the face of the knight. According to Getlein, "there is a sense of obsolescence about the knight accompanied by Death and the Devil." In 1970 writer Sten Karling, and later Ursula Meyer, said that the work did not seek to glorify the knight, but instead depicts a "robber knight" (raubritter). They point to the supposed lack of Christian or religious symbolism in the work and to the fox's tail wrapped on top of the knight's lance – in early Christian Greek symbolism the fox was a symbol of greed, cunning and treachery, as well as lust and whoring. Knights were commonly depicted in contemporary art with a fox tail tied to the tip of their lance. The fox tail was a common form of protective amulet. In this interpretation Death and the Devil are merely the knight's companions on his journey, not omens. ==Reception==

The work is considered one among three of Dürer's Meisterstiche ("master prints"); along with Saint Jerome in His Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514). Most print rooms with a significant collection will have a copy, and there are many, often late and worn, impressions in private collections. In 2017 a 1513 print in good condition sold for US$187,000. Fifty years after Dürer's print, 15-year-old engraver Jan Wierix made a copy. ==Influence==

Germany as an Augustinian friar|250x250px In 1870 Friedrich Nietzsche gave a print of the engraving to Richard Wagner. The work was significant to Nietzsche as a representation of a "brave future" As such, he gave a copy to his sister on the eve of her emigration to Paraguay. After the First World War, writers Thomas Mann and Ernst Bertram described the work as close to what Nietzsche could teach about the fate of Germany; the embodiment of the Renaissance and the teachings of Martin Luther, and as described by Gary Shapiro, they believed it was "invoked in order to intensify the sense of resolute determination in the absence of all hope." Although Durer did not meet Luther, his writings indicate that he admired him highly, and the engraving may well have been intended as a tribute to him. Dürer was idealised from the 1920s by ideologues within the Nazi party as "the most German of German artists". At a 1927 Nazi rally the philosopher, Nazi theorist and ideologue, and later convicted war criminal Alfred Rosenberg compared the assembled stormtroopers to the warrior in Knight, Death and the Devil, exclaiming that "in everything that you do, remember that for the National Socialists only one thing counts: to cry out to the world: And even if the world is full of devils, we must win anyway!" In 1933, the mayor of Nuremberg presented Hitler with an original print of Knight, Death and the Devil, and described Hitler as the "knight without fear or blame, who as the Führer of the new German Reich, once again carried and multiplied the fame of the old imperial city of Nuremberg to the whole world." English Illustration John Tenniel twice made illustrations based on Knight, Death and the Devil: "Alice and the White Knight," the frontispiece to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and a political cartoon called "The Knight and His Companion," published in the April 5, 1887, issue of Punch, wherein the knight is used to represent Otto von Bismarck, while the devil stands in for socialism, and for which Tenniel provided the subtitle "(Suggested by Albert [sic] Dürer's famous picture.)" Other writers In 1968 the Argentinian publisher Galerna published a volume in their book series Variations on a Theme, the theme of this volume being Dürer's engraving. Among the authors asked to write was the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a poem entitled "Ritter, Tod, und Teufel (I)". Borges later wrote another poem named "Ritter, Tod und Teufel (II)", published by Atlántida. In the first poem he praises the knight's courage, writing, "Being / brave, Teuton, you surely will be / worthy of the Devil and Death." In the second he compares his own state to the knight, writing that "It's me and not the Knight that the old, white-faced man, head crowned with writhing snakes, exhorts." Another author who wrote for Variations on a Theme was Marco Denevi, in his story ''A Dog in Dürer's Etching "The Knight, Death and the Devil''. In it, Denevi does not try to tell who the knight is or which specific war the knight is returning from, because "all wars are fragments of a single war, all wars make up the nameless war, simply the war, the War, so that although the knight returns from traveling through a fragment of the war, it is as if he had journeyed through all wars and all the war. ==See also==