Life of the Virgin: The Nativity

Cleveland Museum of Art

Life of the Virgin: The Nativity

Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

This print depicting Christ’s birth belongs to one of the numerous print series that Albrecht Dürer produced on religious themes. Here, the artist focused on everyday details of the Virgin Mary’s life story to emphasize her humanity. Dürer revolutionized the technique of woodcut with such scenes, which told biblical stories with enough descriptive detail and skillful narrative staging to minimize the need for text. The textures, fine details, and perspectival space of his woodcuts surpassed any examples of the medium before him.

LinkedCulture assembled this text from several fields of Cleveland Museum of Art’s catalogue record, so it is not the museum’s own wording as published. See “How LinkedCulture maps this record” below.

Cleveland Museum of Art’s catalogue record

Medium
woodcut
Credit Line
Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland
Type of artwork
Print
Department
Prints

Also in Cleveland Museum of Art’s record. The museum’s own label for these fields has not been confirmed yet, so each is named by its field in the museum’s data.

creation_date
1504–1505

Taken from LinkedCulture’s stored copy of Cleveland Museum of Art’s record. A fresh capture of the museum’s own record has not been made for this object yet.

From LinkedCulture

What looks like a crumbling stable becomes a stage for one of the most technically astonishing prints ever made. Albrecht Dürer's 1504 woodcut "The Nativity," from his Life of the Virgin series, fills every inch with detail, exposed timber beams, tumbling putti in the clouds, shepherds pressing through an archway, all carved into wood with the precision of a painting. Before Dürer, woodcuts were relatively crude; he pushed the medium to capture deep perspective, fine texture, and quiet human storytelling. This single print helped carry biblical narrative across Europe in a way no woodcut had before.

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.

What the image shows

A religious scene depicting the Adoration of the Shepherds, with angels flying above and shepherds gathered around a manger.

Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.

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The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata. The fields above are the museum’s, under its own labels. LinkedCulture’s derived fields are listed separately below and marked as ours.

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Open this page QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.KcuywU-nhibjFQ0n.nEw4ZEuv-6hmicndrXfMvVq1P51l7sI6jsYt8awnnQhopJEBMoVSzX4N-hI80qwSMpbNaLFYw_IZmA1h5otkYpwW-TeNbAtg7PKbVienTTzhMNH2d6aIEIHuuKsxHxixdRDavXN6rtg6r4MYv4Ov_TYUOWx1qoJlXwgKebIKPaOqUtB1ixgQ6HphgF_wmWby-Xtd3S9IOgjyXRM1J2WF62jpGHjVQEwNAysIeH_5owyDLB2eYh_f_vML2rGluR38yiAKMTw0rhaS4nlBM-dqy20M1bB8bSbE83QfrlJvsj6Y1-_HGwSee at Cleveland Museum of Art QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.QdvAOAogpP7nd5Io.zH1fgx8zF2EXKt7nWz6fmxN7VgIGxb0L4trK-kOrYbPBVpLN9HFMKS0KD1-pOsev1Bx44zwNArS020Drk-0TAmcBLhZgLyMqMpe6JWJvfCMc9-INdHBCQn4pAdJ_s3YBypRl8RM2edIfKO_zsTL8zGUZ7KAqNXVSIc7xUfMkM0P0MZGrcruBmbedsq59UGhED0UvHctBwmBS08Qk3xLiaotmoO8NOz5qseLKhRq-RJRhJ3rbk_hbDFMxlWuOUyMYrEVNJ-2O4HD9OyJ1XdyH6k5pPnGUBmp0waBaxY_GXQ
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How LinkedCulture maps this record

To search objects from different museums together, LinkedCulture reads each museum’s record into a common set of fields. The values below are LinkedCulture’s, under LinkedCulture’s names. They are not Cleveland Museum of Art’s wording; the museum’s own record is shown above under its own labels.

Object ID
104133
Object Type
Print
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Type of artwork” · copied as is
Creator
Albrecht Dürer
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creators (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field · Artist-role creator's description with life dates removed.
Culture
Germany, early 16th Century
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Culture” · copied as is
Medium
woodcut
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Medium” · copied as is · Cleveland's 'technique' field holds materials.
Department
Prints
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Department” · copied as is
Tags
  • male
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field tags (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · combined from several museum fields
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field artists_tags (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · combined from several museum fields
Credit Line
Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Credit Line” · copied as is
Date
1504–1505
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
Begin Year
1504
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date_earliest (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
End Year
1505
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date_latest (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is

The museum’s own record has not been captured for this object yet, so the museum fields shown above are limited to values LinkedCulture stored unchanged.

LinkedCulture video

Life of the Virgin: The Nativity

Sep 16, 2026 · Short

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Museum record

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