The Penance of St. John Chrysostom

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Penance of St. John Chrysostom

Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

In the late Middle Ages an unusual legend was assigned to John Chrysostom, a hermit saint who lived in the wilderness. The story related that the daughter of the emperor lost her way during a storm and found shelter in the saint’s cave. In weakness, he betrayed his vow of chastity and in guilt, threw her off a cliff. To repent, John crawled like a beast in the wild for many years. When the girl was miraculously found alive with her child, John was absolved of his sins. Dürer’s focus on the mother and child is unprecedented in representations of the story. Although scholars generally view this print as an opportunity for the artist to depict the female nude, it is also possible that Dürer sought to illustrate a mother’s pure love and its virtuous triumph over sin.

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
engraving
Credit Line
Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
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
c. 1497

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

Around 1497, Albrecht Dürer made a choice no other artist had made before. In this engraving of the legend of Saint John Chrysostom, the crawling penitent saint is pushed far into the background, a tiny figure on all fours beneath a distant walled town. The foreground belongs entirely to a barefoot young woman with flowing hair, cradling an infant against her chest. That quiet recentering of the story, from guilt and punishment to maternal tenderness, is what makes this print still worth debating five centuries later.

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 woman cradles a baby in a rocky landscape.

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.

View at Cleveland Museum of Art ↗

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.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.lm_OB6YNVwNCwBD9.-lg_8gBNy2c9B7TNgsAR7JYh09ew4FQLOB4ivtFvBqeb1djFrcWqrTV2sPhZBZxefEyp-fDxYxwj4XW5pMnc39TI3OQZckAPKi8jyN0AxoBDutWBsco5QYun4zrbSIWDZoeN7VAH3mW8ZV6J-iC6rfT9o2PwVNmyTSI8xEAvQ1jJfBu0jCRxh1s-ypF5zDDUllEmZoDEb1JiqlUBKxFH2WF1y4sKC0_XFqBzxhRblV_eqz-4yWdX9M3UbZBt2YkRzrIMyOJxFujauqDLOFXjXzPkzFGW-FZhI8EKdoTYPRhABrX7BASee at Cleveland Museum of Art QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.mXHdizaicnEPESrA.zg1n73dtfshWZb8fTvgKWJcbX--rPMaPqQ9Uim_UZl53PG_hg6lQsSD3BwQ2Cs7Kr0QE9o8qHhYNZ-KFOZ3ALgrhGaEsmqyFR34qwJvWovyWS1L12v3Kik9K8rfKKEKSSAKr3HWmNN8W9rNqbw-4OSpyEpoChxBPZ9bfIGFmRgsdVXrldn82bAXxxcb1xpbMFOaw75g7jc1bMNNL5gLHTZV0v_EKbSKH0AvIWVfPpbGvmnnuKLwGB7utYC-3_i0CgqRtVxFy9dyjT22639yMCsJWaYSW7BS4yt1VeUECeQ
Open this page
See at Cleveland Museum of Art
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
114738
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, late 15th-early 16th Century
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Culture” · copied as is
Medium
engraving
  • 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 Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Credit Line” · copied as is
Date
c. 1497
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
Begin Year
1492
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date_earliest (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
End Year
1502
  • 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

The Penance of St. John Chrysostom

Nov 4, 2026 · Short

YouTubeInstagram
Follow LinkedCultureYouTubeInstagramBluesky
Museum record

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.