- Museum number
- SL,5218.169
- Description
-
Kneeling angel holding the instruments of the Passion; turned to half-right. 1507-19
Charcoal
- Production date
- 1515 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 329 millimetres
-
Width: 206 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Summary of Summary of J. Rowlands, Drawings by German Artists and Artists from German- speaking regions of Europe in the Department of Prints and and Drawings at the British Museum: the Fifteenth Century, and the Sixteenth Century by Artists born before 1530, London, BM Press, 1993, no.198:
'The plinth for the angel indicated here, suggests that the design may have been intended as a study for a piece of sculpture connected with a Pietà or Man of Sorrows. If so, it would be the only one on such a scale and executed in charcoal by Dürer. It was first described by Waagen as "slightly executed in chalk though with the greatest freedom". Ephrussi dated it c. 1506, and Dodgson slightly earlier, c. 1505; but a decade later, c. 1515, is in my opinion more likely. Its style can be associated with that of the fragment of a cartoon for the ‘Virgin and Child’, now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Winkler, ‘Dürer’, iii, pl. 551) for one of the glass-paintings in the window in the St Sebalduskirche, Nuremberg, commissioned by Siegfried Pfinzing in 1515. Although the present drawing is more freely executed, and less finished, to judge from the rendering of various details, especially the arms and limbs of the angel, there is a close affinity between the use of charcoal in each of these drawings.'
Lit from Rowlands 1993: Waagen, Treasures, i, p. 232, no. 169; Hausmann, Naumann's Archiv, p. 41, no. 169; Hausmann, p. 112, no. 145; Ephrussi, p. 118; Lippmann, part xxiii, p. 15, no. 281, repr.; BM Guide, 1928, p. 22, no. 214; Flechsig, Dürer, ii, p. 332; Tietze, iii, pp. 125f., no. A 368, repr.; Winkler, Dürer, iii, p. 56, no. 613, repr.; Panofsky, ii, p. 90, no. 871; Rowlands, Dürer, p. 20, no. 116; Strauss, ii, p. 886, no. 1505/25, repr.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1928 BM London, Guide Woodcuts, Drawings of A. Dürer, no. 214
1971, BM, Dürer no.116
- Acquisition date
- 1753
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- SL,5218.169
- Additional IDs
-
Miscellaneous number: C,07.169
