Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Four Horsemen
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-840f7214ff34
- Date
- 1498 (1511 edition)
- Medium
- Woodcut
- Department
- European Art
- Institution
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Object ID
- 9192
From LinkedCulture
Four riders are crushing people beneath their hooves, and one victim is being swallowed whole by a monster below. Albrecht Dürer created this woodcut in 1498, stacking War, Discord, Famine, and Death into a driving arrow formation that charges relentlessly across the page. The density of line he achieved here, the tangled bodies, the storm clouds, the descending angel, pushed woodcut from a crude print medium into genuine high art. This single image reshaped how the Book of Revelation has been pictured ever since.
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From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record
Albrecht Dürer achieved such brilliance in the art of woodcut that his prints in this medium approach the precision of engraving. With his fifteen astoundingly detailed Apocalypse woodcuts, he redefined what was possible in the medium. The series interprets the apostle John's Book of Revelation (6:1-8), a story that, amid the millennial fears prevalent in the 1490s, was very much on people's minds. Spreading calamity everywhere, the Four Horsemen charge relentlessly toward the right, stacked in the shape of an arrow: the king with his bow (War), the slaughterer with his sword (Discord), the well-fed man with his scales (Famine), and the wide-eyed figure with his pitchfork (Death). Germany, Europe
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- The William M. Ladd Collection Gift of Herschel V. Jones, 1916
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