The Abduction on a Unicorn

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Abduction on a Unicorn

Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

The volatile mood of this etching starkly contrasts with the abduction scene in Dürer’s Sea Monster. Here, a woman struggles against her male captor as he carries her away on a menacing unicorn with a jagged horn and cloven hoofs. Although unicorns were generally associated with purity, medieval texts also identified the mythical creature as a symbol of evil or death. As with Dürer’s other puzzling scenes of women, scholars have attempted to identify these figures in relationship to classical mythology, in this instance Pluto and Proserpina. This characterization remains vague however; the ominous cloudy sky and savage nature of the event suggests far more sinister circumstances.

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
etching
Credit Line
John L. Severance 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
1516

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 took the unicorn, a symbol of purity, and turned it into an instrument of terror. In this 1516 German etching, a struggling nude woman throws one arm upward in desperate resistance as a powerful male figure carries her off on a dark unicorn with a jagged horn and cloven hoofs, all beneath a sky churning with heavy clouds. Unlike his other abduction prints, this scene resists any clear mythological label, leaving it closer to nightmare than classical story.

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 figure is riding a goat-like creature through a stormy sky.

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.ySQLS8cZ0BepjDHA.zYOa8ebmrYxhwHlo7TzdNUhUGJ7cDJjYnihEfDKL6Qq40n1CksACzCkvGUcD_QBasFpf-5K2QvxxPbodSG-xpwm-m9uf0jKiaHOLequ27xPxqTjkT3kkd_b5kwhNfPVy15UFWadKvwJDrbY06EB53BwJ50r8sCytTpit5BPX9vLeptFPfifq_VrrEfM93pE_mNwSthQDAXmnURK2jWBUOHQlCnW9Z9Oq858owt-8BzPRRnoQWdg8Q4sRUFE-RIUMr2liBhYeRKGCIGoxxvqXT_r5RImpsF19XmH1iQbNm6ULbtS2-wSee at Cleveland Museum of Art QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.C2Ga7MYZDl7E9m4u.6txMuWpgWXS2Fpzn9IDPevbnSFQ7Ne-gjMS_9dvfmacmuWyViZnHBUMe4azSq5U4o19uqbAYv3oKq5Juz55YXIWQs9t8o3_HG9swNjLCCf4gkGMe9D5Q8zNkBP_q-4GqrgAuAypKR618HLgSDN1yYpc85ADI-0ip2S6sYyMOyzLk4f15R88ATY6jFA--fq0MZPmARPQq-6Lm2K81svsqLdBvSGyjZJsaU7HIO98XzdOncxlT4JouAKiuff-k2LnbpU_i4gYSTk3Q9cttMbneqJhNzYgPDUjgnPhF1IW1qQ
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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
139690
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
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Culture” · copied as is
Medium
etching
  • 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
John L. Severance Fund
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field “Credit Line” · copied as is
Date
1516
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
Begin Year
1516
  • Cleveland Museum of Art field creation_date_earliest (museum’s label not yet confirmed) · copied as is
End Year
1516
  • 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 Abduction on a Unicorn

Aug 3, 2026 · Short

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Museum record

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