item details
Albrecht Dürer; after
Overview
The Engraved Passion (1507-1512) was one of four major series of religious prints made by Albrecht Dürer, and helped to establish his reputation as an outstanding Renaissance printmaker. The others were the woodcut series of the Life of the Virgin, the Great Passion, and the Little Passion, all published in 1511. The Engraved Passion consists of fifteen small scale engravings and tells the story of Christ's betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion and resurrection. Dürer is renowned for inventing new and imaginative ways to depict scenes from Christian stories, and in the Engraved Passion the compositions of each plate are dramatic, intricate and complex, with emotive contrasts of light and shadow. Unlike the more populist woodcut prints, they were designed to appeal to a more exclusive market of connoisseurs and collectors. Because it took several years for the series to be completed, it is likely that individual images were sold separately. The series was also sold in sets for devotional use, and was widely copied by other printmakers and in other media.
According to Catholic beliefs of the time (this is less than 10 years away from the Reformation), Christ descended into the underworld between his crucifixion and resurrection, where he rescued the souls of all the just people who had died, and who had been held in limbo since the beginning of the world. The episode is therefore also known as Christ in Limbo.
Christ is shown in the act of rescuing John the Baptist from his dungeon and is immune from the menacing demon perched on the arch and brandishing his spear-like weapon. Christ's triumph over this and other demons, and his successful release of Hell's captives, is central to the story.
The nude figures of an elderly, bearded Adam, the first man that God created, and a demure and much younger Eve, both stand to the right. This print is a reverse copy by an unknown artist after Dürer's original. Both the original (1869-0001-116) and this copy were in the collection of Bishop Ditlev Monrad, which he donated to the Colonial Museum, a forerunner of Te Papa, in 1869.
An even more famous rendition by Dürer of a near-identical but compositionally very different scene is the Christ in Limbo of the Large Passion woodcut series, 1510 (1966-0005-2).
See: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O781131/harrowing-of-hell-christ-in-print-durer/
Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art December 2016