The Holy Trinity.

Although this print was not bound up with the other sheets of Albrecht Dürer's the Large Passion, it is widely regarded in size, style and subject matter as fully consistent with the late scenes from this important series of woodcuts.

The Large Passion is named after the format of the series (39 x 28 cm). The whole series of twelve woodcuts (eleven scenes and a title page) did not appear till 1511 when Dürer published the cycle, together with a title page and a poem by the Benedictine theologian and monk Benedictus Chelidonius. The first seven woodcuts were executed between 1497 and 1500, then the series was completed by five woodcuts in 1510, following his visit to Italy (1505-07).  The complete edition in book form was published in 1511. After Dürer's death, the series was republished in 1675 and 1690. 

The prints are distinguished by means of their strong emotions, naturalism and human treatment of the subject, thus distancing themselves from late Gothic depictions of the Passion. Dürer considered the Passion to be the subject most worthy of representation in pictorial art, and he portrayed it five different times - a sixth version remained unfinished owing to his death. The subject, untrammelled by the strange pictorial apparatus of the Apocalypse, allows a clearer expression of form and intention, appropriate for this central Christian story.

As a woodcut, The Holy Trinity is widely regarded as showing Dürer's technical perfection in the medium. The lines are so fine and densely spaced that it is almost impossible to make them out individually with the naked eye. They merge and fuse, becoming hues of grey that shape the motif. Technique becomes veiled by the overall illusion and the sense of a heavenly vision. The British Museum catalogue claims: 'In no other woodcut does he achieve such a subtle representation of shape and depth through using a system of parallel lines, cross hatching and dashes of varying degrees of density. Nor in any other woodcut does he use the white areas of the paper to heighten parts of his composition with such dramatic effect'.

Dürer intended the woodcut as an invitation to imitate God the Father, who reveals his compassion for whoever lives on earth. In a gesture of tender closeness, God bends his head and casts down his eyes. He is regarded by Dürer scholar David Price as imitating the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, while Christ is the dead figure of the pieta (Price, 165) The sensitive observer is supposed to appreciate and empathise with Christ's agony, and he or she will be admitted to God the Father's lap after their death. The pose of the two figures and their interconnection is almost certainly Dürer's invention, and was highly influential in their subsequent renditions in art history.

The woodcut dates from the same year as Dürer's famous large single panel altarpiece of the same theme, known as The Adoration of the Holy Trinity, commissioned by Matthāus Landauer, and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This has been called the apotheosis of Dürer's work for the Roman Catholic Church, and it predates his conversion to Lutheranism by several years.

A massive painted copy of this print was used as the basis for the temporary decoration designed by Karl-Friedrich Schinkel for the Dürer tercentenary (300th anniversary of his death) festivities in Berlin in 1828. It was designed in the shape of an altarpiece, with the Holy Trinity in a tympanum above, and a sculptured effigy of Dürer with personifications of the arts below.

See David Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, 2003).

Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art                               November 2016