The Life of the Virgin

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Life of the Virgin

Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

The frontispiece of the series is a modification of the devotional imagery Dürer used in his depictions of the Virgin and Child standing in a crescent moon. Here, he also incorporated the themes of the nursing Madonna and the Madonna of Humility, often shown seated. In doing so, Dürer fused the Virgin’s regal, motherly, and humble natures into one striking image. Dürer's cycle depicting Mary's life, which gained instant acclaim, was remarkable not only for its theological accuracy but also for its unprecedented wealth of detail.

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
Dudley P. Allen Fund
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. 1510–11

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

Albrecht Dürer packed three devotional traditions into a single woodcut here, combining the Virgin on a crescent moon, the nursing Madonna, and the humble seated mother all at once. Her robes fall in heavy folds as she nurses the Christ Child, a blazing mandorla of radiating lines surrounding her crowned head and six-pointed stars scattered across the sky above. This print, made around 1510 to 1511, served as the frontispiece to Dürer's Life of the Virgin series, which earned instant acclaim across Europe for carrying the theological depth of a painted altarpiece to a far wider audience through print.

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 Virgin Mary cradles the infant Jesus on a crescent moon surrounded by stars.

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/q1.83zeeVFA9TOmnGm4._19PnTWu_KpSMIWfLnRZ_TCDtRGgi-UIgEX2U7MOSswXFM14yroYGwMDY-RCJmBhgonsXPkiwgaWnG4TiI1dZIBp2YnuMIKDcwqpygW5lonQOjKPqMGrcibPRpnzkJVIvgYiuj8JeNhyBApynVJzzDs1EqT_D3VtTVftRbk2oTU5E5KPXdrCU6dqwDf8B1AjvyyehPebyEo6VGPQ3M2dwf-1IIqWesNn2vvKm4e_itb911nIsyF2CL274ZEvAdEKzOnIIQuOs2r10syEKigvOVWUp1x6noRTsBFa72KEUwuBwQvNnwSee at Cleveland Museum of Art QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.uElAgxHskLE9BjHh.PX-m8y0ml1lZ61zIKiS5NHeFYIXcnPBr3Po8pJhu10D45UkOc6aTUKB4sPjPOlTX55GZ5djM1exHaI2GoVPcLUoHpHMSxfnUPiXfGf2wjvEr6tcf1s9vXeD5Ux_lS5EsrM5Jzpg81HvWfkLlKlvFEw8cDZlWBm6jhcwbBknl9QR5UO4Lz0zbCuBtWYYuXCTANGkvGkSydBw_o9Go6pTD003GfxWybBxS11QMRCNp6UTiTLebTi9XtEU9NA3KKKlUFkLE9Wmp7gma1zibJ0PQbj5wZ9caq_Egpit5kknc
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Provenance & credit

As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.

Provenance
?–1959: (William H. Schab Gallery, New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) | 1959–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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
136172
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
Dudley P. Allen Fund
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Credit Line” · copied as is
Provenance
?–1959: (William H. Schab Gallery, New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) | 1959–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Provenance” · copied as is
Date
c. 1510–11
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
Begin Year
1510
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date_earliest (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
End Year
1511
  • 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 Life of the Virgin

Oct 19, 2026 · Short

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Museum record

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