Renaissance Studies Vol. 19 No. 4

© 2005 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKREST Renaissance Studies 0269-1213 © 200X The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd XXXif known)Original Article)

Dürer’s RiderPatricia Emison

Dürer’s

Rider

Patricia Emison

After the

Adam and Eve

of 1504, the next extraordinarily elaborate engravingDürer embarked upon, nine years later, was the so-called

Knight Death and theDevil

, a print Dürer referred to merely as the Rider (‘der Reuter’) (Fig. 1).Although this engraving typically is taken in the art historical literature as an

exemplum

, the present article argues instead that its function is less traditional.The combination of iconographic peculiarities, compositional implications,and historical circumstance suggest an interpretation more in line withMachiavelli’s

Prince

than with Christian devotional literature, as does also itsplace within a thematic development within Dürer’s oeuvre.

Panofsky’s famous discussion of the engraving explicated the image as thatof an emblematical and exemplary Christian knight.

1

He followed a traditionof interpretation going back to Sandrart, who had named it as ‘der ChristlicheRitter.’

2

More particularly, Panofsky took the resolute knight to be one withproto-Lutheran overtones, almost as though the figure were heading towardthat mighty fortress of Luther’s hymn. The engraving was, of course, madeat a time when Dürer could not have yet heard of Luther; it was only icono-logically that Panofsky found the image to be highly compatible with thethought of the incipient Reformation, rather than iconographically. Hequoted Dürer’s 1521 journal entry, in which he hailed Erasmus, of all people,as the Knight of Christ. Though Dürer recognized that Erasmus was but an‘aged little man,’

3

he called on him for help after the temporary disappear-ance of Luther, who was thought to have fallen into ill hands rather than (asturned out to be the case) protective ones. He addressed the humanist inrather dramatic terms: ‘Hark, Thou Knight of Christ, ride forth at the sideof Christ our Lord, protect the truth, obtain the crown of the martyrs!’

At best, this private expostulation is of marginal relevance to the engraving,which does not show a prospective martyr at the side of Christ, but an armedrider closely accompanied by Christ’s opposites. Rather than providing acommentary on the engraving, the passage shows us how abstract was Dürer’sconception of knighthood, that it extended even to the sedentary Erasmus.

1

E. Panofsky,

The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer

(1955), 151–54.

2

Joachim von Sandrart,

Academie der Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675

, ed. A. R. Peltzer, Munich(1925), 64.

3

William M. Conway,

The Writings of Albrecht Dürer

(New York), 159.

512

Patricia Emison

Nevertheless, the righteous fervour evinced by Dürer in this passage wasassociated by Panofsky with the engraving, which thereby became firmlylodged in the category of inspiring, didactic images, clearly still derivative infunction, if not in form, from the altarpiece.

For Panofsky, Dürer was a Lutheran

avant la lettre

, that is, someone whoconceptualized the imperilled soul as Luther soon would, as genuinelythreatened rather than as simplistically triumphant. The magnificent steed,which for Panofsky was evidence of a direct link to Leonardo’s drawings,bespoke the ideal. But Panofsky felt it incumbent upon himself to defendthe engraving from pre-existing charges of incoherence between the ideal,Italianate steed and the more Germanic accretions surrounding him. Hissolution was to cast the Knight himself more ideally, not merely as the

Fig. 1 Dürer, The Rider, 1513 engraving, B. VII, 98 (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute)

Dürer’s

Rider 513

perfect German knight (endorsed, unfortunately, as such by the Nazis), butas a ‘Christian Pilgrim on his journey through life.’ In characteristicallyHegelian tenor, Panofsky found ‘the visual image of the perfect horsemanmerged with the mental image of the

miles Christianus

.’ Thus interpreted, thework achieved that synthesis of form and meaning, as well as that universalityof theme, which Panofsky expected of a great work.

Despite the obviously anachronistic tact of appealing to Dürer’s distraughtjotting about Luther to explicate the engraving, few have challengedPanofsky’s interpretation since – at least in its watered-down form, whichemphasizes the Erasmian element. The supposed connection to the

Enchiridionmilitis christiani

predates Panofsky, going back at least to 1905,

4

and remainscurrent. According to Koerner, for instance, the ‘Erasmian ideal of self-mastery’ is pictured here: ‘the monologic self, bounded off from the world,is metaphorized as a knight in armour controlling his powerful mount ofclassical pedigree as he passes through the world on the difficult, pathlessjourney toward salvation.’

5

E. H. Gombrich offered an exception to this Erasmian earnestness.

6

Toying,at least, with the notion that Panofsky could have had the whole thingbackwards, he asked whether the equestrian figure was not characterized asa sinner rather than as a noble exemplar. Gombrich described the expressionas that of someone ‘in need of a sermon,’ took Death to be issuing a warning,and characterized the Knight as one more akin to Shylock or Don Giovannithan to St George. For Gombrich, it had always been a mistake – whether byNietzsche, Goebbels, and Göring, or by more professional interpreters – tosee the engraving as ‘a romantic image of Nietzschean individualism.’Instead, he suggested that it showed a knight warned by Death, a knight whoserved as an emblem of mortality and sin rather than of Christian faith.

7

Ursula Meyer contributed an even less flattering analysis of the equestrian,one which included information on the social history of the knight inDürer’s period as a figure of menace and criminality, and which credited theimage’s rehabilitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to national-istic motives.

8

Although her analysis may have gone a bit too far in stressingthe malevolence of the horseman, both Meyer’s and Gombrich’s readingshave been largely ignored since.

9

4

W. Strauss,

The Complete Engravings, Etchings

,

and

Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer

(New York, 1973), 150, citesP. Weber,

Beiträge zu Dürers Weltanschauung

(Strassbourg, 1900), 13. See more recently, Heinrich Theissing,

Dürer’s ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel.’ Sinnbild und Bildsinn

(Berlin, 1978).

5

Joseph Leo Koerner,

The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

(Chicago, 1993), 430.

6

E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Evidence of Images,’ in

Interpretation: Theory and Practice

, ed. Charles Singleton(Baltimore, 1969), 98–102.

7

Cf. Dürer’s later drawing of a knight on foot with death standing by him, hourglass in hand; W. Strauss,

The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer

(New York, 1974), III, 1515/7.

8

U. Meyer, ‘Political implications of Dürer’s

Knight, Death, and Devil

,’

Print Collector’s Newsletter

, no. 2, IX(1978–79), 35–39.

9

P. Strieder,

Albrecht Dürer

, tr. N. Gordon and W. Strauss (New York, 1982), 178–80: ‘The artistic, carefullyconstructed form makes it impossible to regard the rider negatively.’

514

Patricia Emison

The work Dürer’s print most resembles is Donatello’s

Gattemelata

in Padua,which he must have seen during his stay in nearby Venice, from which hewas newly returned when he made the engraving.

10

The type of the eques-trian, though traditionally heroicized in Italian art, was far from universallyadmired in life. Meyer showed this for Germany, but it was also the case inan Italy which had been subjected to a succession of foreign invasions since1494, not to mention the marauding of Cesare Borgia.

In Nuremberg, the equestrian was a more novel subject than in Italy. AsPanofsky appreciated, the equestrian type could claim the rare status of adual heritage, both ancient and medieval. The Emperor Maximilian liked tobe pictured as a glorious figure on horseback, comparable either to MarcusAurelius or to St George. Dürer’s Rider, however, is oddly compromised byhis immediate company. He is surrounded by symbols and signs of death:the skull in front, the lizard at his flank, Death with his instruments oftimekeeping, including an inexorable bell, as well as snakes; the Devil withhis particularly nasty-looking halberd.

The Devil is very close; his claw seems almost a part of the armour. Thedog, who was distinctly more kempt and showy in the preliminary drawings,has his ears back, perhaps because of the proximity of evil. Particularlyby comparison with the fine dogs Dürer accorded to St Eustace (B. 57),he seems of undistinguished breed.

11

Panofsky found him ‘handsome,’ butmen’s prize dogs of the Renaissance (in contrast to ladies’ lap dogs) seem tohave been uniformly short-haired. The Master of 1515’s obviously derivativeintaglio work (H. 15) shows the knight’s accompanying dog scratching hisfleas (Fig. 2).

12

His image establishes for us that the equestrian need not havebeen taken entirely seriously in these years; the question is rather whetherthe Master of 1515 took the enormous step of tweaking the significance ofthe equestrian type, or, more plausibly, whether Dürer led the way.

The lance held by Dürer’s equestrian, which extends out of the pictureframe on either side, has attracted little attention, not even the fox’s tailwrapped around it near the top.

13

Yet this fox’s tail is hard to interpret as anattribute of ideal Christian valor. In the familiar Aesop, as in the medievaltales of Raynard the Fox, the animal generally connotes craftiness and wile.There appears to be a pellet bell affixed to the harness at the top of thehindquarters of the horse, an item more reminiscent of fools than of saints.

10

C. Eisler,

Dürer’s Animals

(Washington, 1991), 226–45. On the stride of the horse, revised by Dürer as heworked on the design, see Wolfgang Mössner, ‘Der rechte Tritt im Schritt,’ in

Diversarum artium studia: Beiträgezu Kunstwissenschaft, Kunsttechnoligie und Ihren Randgebieten, Festschrift für Heinz Roosen-Runge

(Wiesbaden, 1982),121–22.

11

Eisler, 176, disagrees, identifying the dog as a talbot, and as a breed shown in heraldry. For his verydifferent take on the engraving, see also ‘Maximilian and Dürer’s Major Engravings,’ in

Ars auro Prior: StudiaIoanni Bia

l

ostocki Sexagenario Dicata

(Warsaw, 1981), 297–301. For the preparatory drawings, see Strauss, III,1513/1–3.

12

Cf. P. Emison, ‘Prolegomenon to the Study of Italian Renaissance Prints,’

Word and Image

, XI (1995), 1–15.

13

See also Meyer, 38.

Dürer’s

Rider 515

In the engraving of 1514, Dürer gave Jerome in his study a halo; not so thisman, whose face is nearly as shadowed as Melencolia’s, and whose identity isgeneric. All in all, the Rider’s virtue is far from obvious; what is apparent ishis worldliness, his closeness to dirt, and to death.

1513 was the year in which Erasmus wrote

Julius Exclusus

, a searingcondemnation of a warrior pope just dead, a man whose appearance onhorseback and in armour had been thought ill of. It was likewise the year inwhich Machiavelli first drafted

Il Principe

, with its at least ostensible praise ofCesare Borgia, an ex-cardinal turned soldier, proud of his horses, a man whohad been strongly associated with death and the devil. It was the year afterthe death of Gaston de Foix, the admired young knightly nephew of the Kingof France, at the Battle of Ravenna, a battle commemorated in an engraving

Fig. 2 Master of 1515, Roman Cavalier with a Dog, (c. 1515) engraving, H. 15

516

Patricia Emison

by Master NA · DAT (Fig. 3).

14

He died, aged twenty-three, while leadingvictorious troops in a battle that marked the shift to warfare based ongunpowder rather than tournament skills.

15

14,000 men died;

16

and althoughthere had been bloodier battles, the world of chivalry itself was moribundthereafter. It is dubious that a work of art conceived in the immediateaftermath of this European crisis would have treated the subject of amounted knight in a completely traditional and idealizing manner.

Dürer often put landscapes into his images, but this Rider is oppressed bythe rock face toward which he heads. There is a suggestion of his beingherded into hell itself, through a passageway established by the cliff on hisright and the stump with the death’s head on his left. The exposed roots athis back are neatly framed by the lance and the devil’s horn, the snaky rootsacting compositionally as complement to Death’s head – as, similarly, thehead of Death’s horse echoes the head of the Rider’s horse. It is as though

14

Hind 2,1; reverse copy by Agostino Veneziano (B. XIV, 313,415). A second state is dated 1530. Theengraving includes an equestrian on the far left, likely Gaston himself, and, prominently in the foreground,a cannon.

15

The New Cambridge Modern History, I,

The Renaissance, 1493–1520

, 361, 284; J. R. Hale,

War and Societyin Renaissance Europe: 1450–1620

, Montreal (1998), 48, and idem, ‘Gunpowder and the Renaissance,’ in

Fromthe Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly

, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York,1965), 113–44. He quotes Franecsco di Giorgio and Francesco Guicciardini associating guns with the devil,and cites German examples as well.

16

Michael Murrin,

History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic

(Chicago, 1994), 124–26.

Fig. 3 NA · DAT (with a Mouse-Trap), The Two Armies at the battle of Ravenna, 1512 engraving, H. 2 (British Museum)

Dürer’s

Rider 517

the trees with their roots offered a vegetal analogue to the idea of the livingRider whose subterranean identity is as Death himself. It is not merely thatDeath warns him, but that he himself manifests death’s power. The appearanceof life is understood as hiding the reality of death, as the trees are attachedto bone-like roots below.

The letter S on the tablet, which is generally taken to imply ‘Anno Salutis,’is unprecedented in Dürer’s other dates. If Dürer’s portrayal of the Rider isthus fraught with menace, Dürer may have chosen to separate his monogramfrom the contents of the image with that protective ‘S,’ shielding himselffrom the product of his own imagination, rather like crossing oneself intimes of danger.

Certainly as a conventional image, intended to celebrate the active lifeand gallant knighthood, the

Rider

would have been more likely to providecommercial success than it would as a deliberately understated parody – thesort of thing Clifford Geertz characterized as the mimicked or burlesquedwink which can so easily be conflated with the authentic wink, itself animitation of a blink.

17

But that is exactly the question here: did Dürer use theequestrian type straightforwardly in this instance, or did he pry the formaway from its expected content? Did he make an elaborate engraving whichfew people would fully understand, but which could be sold to people whosupposed they did? The noble equestrian type was customarily an identifiableportrait, unlike this anonymous rider. If the average viewer assumed thatthis anonymous figure was like the ones with whom he or she was alreadyfamiliar, then Dürer could market the print without causing a stir, at thesame time leaving the door open for those who were apt. Dürer did not oftendistribute the

Rider

on his journey to the Low Countries, far less often thanthe

St Jerome in his Cell

, which clearly does serve a conventional purpose, andless often than the

Melencolia

. He only mentions it by name twice.

18

If indeed this was not a celebratory image, if it was more what we wouldnow call an experimental project than one engineered for market success, ifit was a meaningful image with its meaning put in quotation marks, then itsplace in Dürer’s oeuvre is all the more interesting. As such, it would fit intothe development which can be traced from his odd engraved portraits ofhorses with anonymous and not very heroic, halberd-bearing soldiers (the

Small Horse

, B. 96, the

Large Horse

, B. 97) of 1505 and his equally odd

Coat ofArms with a Skull

(B. 101) of 1503, a lady bothered by death and the devil,which seems a pair to the

Rider

in some ways. The development leadsultimately beyond the engraving of 1513 to the etched

Cannon

of 1518(B. 99) (Fig. 4), which is notable partly for the absence of any knight amidstsoldiers and foreigners, whose combined presence seems to imply the sort of

17

C. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,’ in

The Interpretation of Cultures

,(New York, 1973), 6, 10.

18

Conway, 109, 114.

518

Patricia Emison

situation in which a knight would have been expected to appear. Instead thescene is dominated by the novel piece of artillery.

19

Whereas the Rider ishemmed in by the landscape, his destruction apparently imminent, in thelater etching a machine dominates both land and men. No knight, no horseeven, can be seen.

The

Cannon

is an image purged of anything ideal, and as such it is a moreunified composition than either the

Adam and Eve

or the

Rider

, with their idealforms dominating the foreground and more complicated backgrounds.

20

The

Jerome in his Study

and the

Melencolia

, both of 1514, are like the

Cannon

in thisrespect: they are images in which figure and setting are highly unified. The

Rider

is transitional, a work still relatively disjunctive – but not due to anystylistic fault such as Panofsky tried to deny. That very disjunctiveness is asymptom of the complexity of Dürer’s project.

19

The Cannon, moreover, is branded with the Imperial eagle; the Rider has no overt religious emblem(though the large painted copy,

c

. 1600, in Karlsruhe does make one of the hanging medallions into an imageof the Virgin). His leaves, on the horse’s head and tail, seem apotropaic rather than emblematic, and couldconnote a kind of superstitiousness and lack of faith.

20 Since we know that Dürer admired Pollaiuolo’s work, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether his Adamand Eve reflected back upon the Battle of the Nudes, with its emblematic vegetal background and its less thanideal presentation of the normally ideal male nude; on which, see P. Emison, ‘The Word Made Naked inPollaiuolo’s Battle of the Nudes,’ Art History, XIII (1990), 261–75. See also on the Cannon, idem, Creating the‘Divine’ Artist from Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden, 2004), 55–58.

Fig. 4 Dürer, Landscape with Cannon, 1518 engraving, B. VII, 86 (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute)

Dürer’s Rider 519

1513 was a pivotal year in the history of conceptualizations of valour andvirtue. Five years earlier, a noble equestrian could be represented withoutqualm. But in the midst of pan-European war, just after the death of thebellicose and berated Julius II, the image of the equestrian had newlyunfavourable connotations. The leonine features of the Rider might haveconnoted courage only a short time before, but courage was not what ithad been, now that gunpowder was wiping out the likes of Gaston de Foix.Lodovico Sforza, the original patron of Leonardo’s designs for an equestrianmonument (in honour of Lodovico’s father) and another not very wise ruler,had already died in a French dungeon, an end brought upon himself by hismilitarism. If we are to take the Rider as a figure of monition rather than ofstalwartness, as a kind of descendent of those death-bearing horses of thewoodcut Apocalypse,21 as unsettling rather than admirable, then Machiavelli’sIl principe may be more apposite a comparison than Erasmus’ Enchiridion.The engraving and Machiavelli’s original manuscript are of the same year.The unsentimental tone of both may be seen to owe much to this changedhistorical setting.

Erasmus himself offered an alternative to the naive idealism of theEnchiridion, and did so on more than one occasion. The Praise of Folly (1511)has become the most popular such example. It was much read in Italy and,together with Machiavelli’s Il principe of nearly the same date, constituted aturn away from the earnest but effete fervour of Ficino’s brand of humanism.22

The Erasmus of the Adages was likewise one neatly balanced between loyaltyto the inspiring example of the ancients and the more down-to-earth folkwisdom which would later flourish in Brueghel’s Proverbs. Parody would betoo strong a word for Dürer’s treatment of the male horseman, but a certaintweaking of the customary significance seems plausible. Like Erasmushimself, he is increasingly contemporary in the references his art makes.

The disparity between the recent past and the present pushed Machiavellifrom the antique models he admired toward his aggressively modernhandbook, as it also pushed Dürer into rethinking the type of the equestrian.It is even conceivable that, when Machiavelli characterized a successfulleader as needing the qualities of both fox and lion, assuming this came inthe revision, he might have known Dürer’s image of an old, leonine warriorwith only a fox’s bushy tale as his emblem. More likely, Machiavelli and Dürermay simply have shared access to Aesop.23 In any case this crusty old warrior,who only wants to keep going as long as he can, on as glorious a horse as

21 It is interesting, though in itself inconclusive, that the two most recessed riders wear hats reminiscent ofthe figures on the right of the Cannon, whereas the second rider, next to death on the pale horse, isgenerically similar to our Rider.

22 Cf. Augustin Renaidet, Érasme et l’Italie (Geneva, 1998), Ch. VII.23 On Machiavelli’s literary sources, most importantly Aesop, see Najemy, 168; and Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is

a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Ch. 2. Sandrart, 64, oddly enough takes theSt. Jerome in his Study to show the combination fox and lion.

520 Patricia Emison

he can get, is compatible with Machiavelli’s unsentimental, and certainlyunromanticized, vision.

Machiavelli addressed his revised version of the Il principe manuscript toLorenzo de’ Medici,24 who had become Duke of Urbino in 1516. From earlyin Leo X’s reign, Urbino had been intended for Medici appropriation.Giuliano de’ Medici, who figures prominently in the company of Baldassare’sCastiglione’s Cortegiano and to whom Il principe was originally to have beendedicated, refused to disinherit the successor of his former host Guidobaldo(Federico’s son), Francesco Maria della Rovere, and so was replaced by themore bellicose and ruthless Lorenzo in that dynastic scheme.25 Giulianoinstead became Duke of Nemours, the title Gaston de Foix had borne.

Machiavelli must have written at least the revised version of Il principe, andperhaps even the original version, with Urbino much on his mind. Onceruled by the much-loved Duke Federico, later taken by the much-hatedCesare Borgia, Urbino became the principality of Machiavelli’s dedicatee,Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, the Cesare Borgia of his day.26 Lorenzowas thus successor at several removes to the good old Federico da Montefeltro,admired as knight and scholar, a rare prince more loved than feared.‘Eccellentissimo Federigo,’27 the beloved prince who was successful in allthings except founding a lasting dynasty, is a figure whose memory is unspokenbut nevertheless present in Il principe. He is the powerful prince who did nothave to live by fear, even without the benefit of a tradition of long, stable,dynastic rule. His admired career might have seemed to belie the lessons ofIl principe, except that – as Machiavelli was well aware – times had worsenedduring the thirty years since Federico’s death in 1482.

Machiavelli’s text was boldly unidealized, but it was also not intendedfor publication. Dürer’s image was intended for printing, and hence for widedistribution. It could not, and it did not, shock. For one thing, it offered astudy of a splendid horse. What renunciation there was of artistic idealismwas handled subtly enough for the ignorant to see only what was familiar andreassuring, rather than the more dangerous underlying truths, as humaniststypically put it when explaining allegory. In the Adam and Eve, Dürer hadincluded symbols of the four humours, the parrot, and the goat for anyoneready to see more than the standard story; and he had alluded to ancientstatuary. In the Melencolia, he would soon provide a puzzle such as lovers ofthe visual arts had never seen before, an image meant to intrigue rather thanto teach. In that case, as in the engraving of the Rider, the language of arthad been made so vernacular as to lose, or at least redirect, a good deal of itsencomiastic force. Both presented figural types toward whom the alert viewer

24 On the debate about dating the revision to 1518, see John Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power andDesire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–15 (Princeton, 1993), 177ff.

25 J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (Plymouth, 1977), 99–100.26 Cf. Hale, op. cit., 100, ‘Leo’s Cesare Borgia.’27 Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Book VII, 31.

Dürer’s Rider 521

could have no simple, categorical response. It was part of their purpose thatthey should be like that, and should demand a new degree of attention.

Dürer used the general type, the anonymous equestrian, to demote whatin the particular he would have been obliged to praise. Michelangelo’scharacterization of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, as a generic figure of theActive Life in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo allowed him, similarly, to skirtthe problem of awarding undue praise. Brueghel, when he appropriatedthe arm of the figure of Giuliano de’ Medici, likewise in the Medici Chapel,for his engraved figure of Acedia, may have implied a certain sympathywith Michelangelo’s refusal to flatter. Perhaps part of the impetus behindthe Sistine ignudi was a certain sense of liberation from the particulariconographic roles the corresponding figures would have taken on the Tomb.Sometimes the generic could function as a less conventional, and somewhatparadoxically also the less ideal, figure than the particular.

Rather than as his unique foray into religious allegory, Dürer’s Ridershould be seen as his farewell to the equestrian type, as portrait and asideal. This farewell was given circumspectly, necessarily so, since it came fromwithin the cultural ambient of the Emperor Maximilian, widely known asan ineffectual would-be knight, whose role in the Italian wars had beencharacteristically irresolute and undistinguished, and had resulted in negativeeconomic impact on his Empire.28 Maximilian was Dürer’s patron, and itwould be nonsense to suppose that the engraving insulted his Emperor. Butwhen Dürer portrayed Maximilian, it was not as an equestrian; and when theCannon was issued, carrying the imagery of war into a new era while usingthe etching technique associated with the glamorous armour of the old,Maximilian was moribund. Dürer understood well both the boundaries andthe latitudes of his own time.

Dürer as engraver was busily, though cautiously, inventing art independentof aura, hundreds of years before mass media, and without depending exclu-sively on respect for artistic accomplishment. His impetus may have been asmuch historical as stylistic or personal. In this engraving Dürer shows us amodern warrior, a figure more like Cesare Borgia than like Federigo daMontefeltro, realizing already as he does so that the cannon has vanquishedthe valiant knight forever. As Jacopo Guicciardini wrote to his brotherFrancesco of the Battle of Ravenna, ‘It was a horrible and terrible thing tosee how . . . helmets with heads inside them, scattered limbs, halves of men, avast quantity, were sent flying through the air.’29 Like Erasmus in his adage‘Dulce bellum inexpertis,’ Dürer acknowledges that war has become newlynasty without citing cannon explicitly. As in il Principe with its unspokenretrospection to Federico, the ideal exists here as palimpsest – but onlyas that. It was a relatively small step from the Rider to the Master of 1515’s

28 G. Benecke, Maximilian I (1459–1519), An analytical biography (London, 1982), 50.29 Murrin, 125.

522 Patricia Emison

slightly ludicrous equestrian, or, for that matter, to Dürer’s Four Apostles,meant to warn as much as to honour. Dürer reduced the relative importanceof making altarpieces not only by his adherence to printmaking, but, morefundamentally, by making images which actively spoke of new things, in newways, to those who were listening with new attentiveness.

University of New Hampshire