print
- Museum number
- E,4.135
- Description
-
The Dream of the Doctor, also known as the Temptation of the Idler; a man sleeping on a bench in front of a tiled oven while a dragon-like creature, representing the devil, blows with a bellow into his ear; Venus and Cupid, the latter trying to walk on stilts, in the foreground.
Engraving
- Production date
- 1498 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 186 millimetres
-
Width: 117 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Entry from 'Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy', 2002, no. 56:
'The curious subject of this print is linked to contemporary proverbs and literature. An elderly man is asleep, his head resting on comfortable cushions next to a large warm stove. His inactivity denotes the sin of idleness, or sloth, as illustrated in a proverb of the day, 'Idling is the pillow of the Devil'. In Sebastian Brant's 'Ship of Fools' (Das Narrenschiff , Basel, 1494) which includes some woodcut illustrations that have been attributed to the young Dürer, an idler is described as being open to temptation: 'No one is fond of a sluggard in his house / Any more than a hibernating mouse. /To sleep by day and sleep by night, /To sit by the stove is his delight. / The Evil One quite soon takes heed /And quickly sows his evil seed'. This description accounts for the appearance of the stove, the sleepy atmosphere and also the devil, seen here alerting the idler with a pair of bellows to a seductive figure of Venus, who is identified by the Cupid trying to climb on a pair of stilts beside her.'
For an interpretation of the tiled stove, 'Kachelofen' as it was known to contemporaries, see Print Quarterly, XXIX, 2012, p.44.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1971 BM, Dürer, no.72
- Acquisition date
- 1799
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- E,4.135