Cleveland Museum of Art
Nemesis
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- c. 1501–02
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, early 16th Century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 122919
From LinkedCulture
Albrecht Dürer's engraving Nemesis, made around 1501 to 1502, fuses two ancient goddesses into a single hovering giant. A winged female figure balances on a sphere above the clouds, holding a jeweled goblet in one hand and a bridle in the other, punishment and reward offered at the same moment. Far below her, a precise Alpine town sits in miniature scale, dwarfed and exposed. This merger of Nemesis and Fortuna was Dürer's own invention, and it remains one of the most commanding images of fate ever put to copper.
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 winged figure holds a chalice while floating above a cityscape.
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
According to the Latin poem that inspired this engraving, Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, had the “power to crush the arrogant minds and triumphs of men and to confound their too ambitious plans.” Ready to dispense judgment, Nemesis hovers formidably above the clouds that separate her from the insignificant town below. As in the poem, here Nemesis has her traditional attributes—a bridle for punishment and a goblet for reward—but Dürer conflated her with Fortuna, the goddess of fortune, who balances on a sphere to symbolize the unpredictable, topsy-turvy nature of fate.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Ralph King
- Provenance
- ?-1943: Fanny Tewksbury King [1867-1949], Cleveland Heights, OH | April 26, 1943: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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