Cleveland Museum of Art
The Dream of the Doctor
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- c. 1500
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, late 15th-early 16th Century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 114741
From LinkedCulture
A sleeping scholar, a crouching devil with a bellows, and a monumental nude rising from a dream. Around 1500, Albrecht Dürer packed all of that into a single small engraving. The devil stokes impure thoughts while Venus stands fully visible at the center, a winged putto playing at her feet, turning a moral warning about idleness into something the viewer is quietly drawn into as well. Dürer uses the dream itself as the argument, making the audience complicit in the very sin on display.
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 nude male figure stands beside a seated woman, both in a room with architectural details.
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.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
Scholars generally agree that this curious engraving represents the contemporary proverb "Idling is the pillow of the devil," a moral message against the sin of sloth. Here, a middle-aged scholar dozes before a warm stove. The devil hovers behind him and uses a fireplace bellows to kindle impure desires. Aroused by the devil’s sinful provocation, the scholar’s subconscious conjures Venus, an object of lustful temptation. Dürer’s image explores the realm of dreams and innermost thought in association with powerful female sexuality. Like many of his other engravings of this early period, Dürer uses obscure, moralistic stories to consider the female nude both creatively and intellectually. Although aimed at a primarily cultured male audience, Dürer presents Venus as a source of desire not only for the sinful idler, but for the viewer as well.
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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.
- Provenance
- Richard Fisher (1809-1890), Midhurst, England (Lugt 2204) | Henry Studdy Theobald (1847-1934), London, England (Lugt 1376)
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