The Meisterstiche ("master prints") by
Dürer are three of his most famous engravings. They are
''Knight, Death and the Devil'' (1513),
''Melencolia I'' (1514) and
''St. Jerome in His Study'' (1514). These three large prints (about ) are often grouped together because of their perceived quality and unity of meaning, although this latter is a matter of scholarly dispute.
Art historian
Erwin Panofsky
Erwin Panofsky (March 30, 1892 in Hannover – March 14, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime.
Panofsky's work represents a high ...
has described them as showing meticulous care in execution and also having complexity and significance in terms of iconography. Panofsky, while recognising that these are Durer's "most famous engravings" and are "not unjustly, known as his "Meisterstiche" notes that they "have no appreciable compositional relationship with one another" and should not, in any technical sense, be "considered as "companion pieces". They do, Panofsky argues, form "a spiritual unity". Here Panofsky refers to
Friedrich Lippmann's noticing of the scholastic classification of the virtues they represent: the moral, the theological and the intellectual. The ''Knight'' showing "the life of the Christian in the practical world of decision and action"; ''St.Jerome'' showing "the life of the Saint in the spiritual world of sacred contemplation"; and Melencolia I showing the "life of the secular genius in the rational and imaginative worlds of science and art".
[Panofsky, E (1955) ''The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer'', Princeton University Press, 3rd Edition (1st Edition 1943) p151]
File:Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, NGA 6637.jpg, The Knight
File:Albrecht Dürer - Melencolia I - Google Art Project ( AGDdr3EHmNGyA).jpg, Melencolia I
''Melencolia I'' is a large 1514 engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The print's central subject is an enigmatic and gloomy winged female figure thought to be a personification of melancholia – melancholy. Holding her h ...
File:Dürer-Hieronymus-im-Gehäus.jpg, St. Jerome
References
{{Reflist
Other sources
* Grigg, Robert (1986) "Studies on Dürer's Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands: The Distribution of the" Melencolia I"." ''Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte'', 398-409.
* Filippi, Elena, and Michael Friel. (1995) ''Albrecht Dürer's Meisterstiche: proposal for an historical-epochal reading''. University of Chicago, Chicago
* Lippmann, F. (1883-1929) Zeichnungen von Albrecht Durer in Nachbildungen (7 vols., vols. VI and VII F. Winkler, ed.), Berlin
Prints_by_Albrecht_Dürer