Cleveland Museum of Art
Coat of Arms with a Skull
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- 1503
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, early 16th Century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 131200
From LinkedCulture
What happens when a coat of arms, a symbol of honor and pride, is crowned with a human skull? In this 1503 engraving, Albrecht Dürer places a fur-covered wild man beside an elegantly dressed maiden, the two of them flanking a heraldic shield bearing that stark skull at its center. The pairing is a deliberate moral warning, beauty and lust set against the certainty of death. Dürer's own monogram sits quietly at the lower right, claiming one of the most unsettling prints of the early sixteenth century.
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 in elaborate attire stands beside a shield with a skull and a winged creature.
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
In this visual allegory, Dürer creatively entangled themes of love and death. The hairy wild man, a traditional medieval figure of virility, lust, and aggression, plays the role of lover to a maiden dressed in alluring clothing. The skull on the fanciful coat of arms is a bold reminder that vanity and illicit desire carry a mortal price.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Provenance
- Pierre Mariette, 1667, Paris | Alfred Hubert, Paris | Pierre Mariette (1634-1716), Paris, inscription (Lugt 1789), verso, lower right, in pen and brown ink. Alfred Hubert (died 1908), Paris, stamp (Lugt 130), verso, lower left, in black. John Charrington (born 1856), Shenley, England, stamp (Lugt 572), lower right, embossed. purchased from (William H. Schab)
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.