Cleveland Museum of Art
The Sea Monster
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- c. 1501
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, late 15th-early 16th Century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 114740
From LinkedCulture
Around 1501, Albrecht Dürer engraved a scene that still puzzles scholars today. A horned sea creature, half man and half fish, carries a nude woman through coastal waters while her companions across the river throw their arms up in panic. Yet the woman herself looks completely unbothered. Behind them all, Nuremberg castle rises in careful detail, and that contrast between chaos and calm makes this one of Dürer's most technically ambitious and genuinely strange early prints.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
The precise narrative of Dürer’s Sea Monster remains a source of debate among scholars because locating the origin of this imagery in either classical or German mythology has been difficult. The engraving depicts a woman’s abduction by a horned mythical hybrid creature that has the torso of a man and the tail of a fish. Set before a detailed coastal landscape featuring Nuremberg castle, the woman’s companions across the river flail their arms in distress over her kidnapping. While it is clear that Dürer aimed to showcase his achievements in portraying a reclining female nude, her somewhat blasé appearance and lack of struggle add to the peculiarity of this image.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.