Art Institute of Chicago

Erasmus of Rotterdam

Albrecht Dürer

Date

1526

Medium

Engraving in black on ivory laid paper

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Albrecht Dürer idolized the learned Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, famously noting in his diary that Erasmus should take over for the Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther, whom Dürer feared had been killed. The artist and the scholar met three times in the Netherlands in 1520–21, and Dürer gave Erasmus several prints and drew his portrait. Erasmus also praised the artist, observing that, like artists of antiquity, “What cannot Dürer express in monochromes, that is, by black lines only?” Fittingly, Dürer’s expansive monochrome engraving includes Latin and Greek captions complimenting Erasmus’s scholarship, with his hefty tomes piled along its lower edge.

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