DÜRER ALBRECHT, WOLGEMUT MICHAEL AND WORKSHOP, The seventh day of Creation, 1493

Woodcut (sheet dimensions cm 46 x 31.5; image dimensions cm 27 x 22.3).
Leaf from Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum, the celebrated Nuremberg Chronicle, edition with the Latin text printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1493. On the verso, the Creation of Adam, impression with rubricated initials.
The blocks for the work were made by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff and their workshop, where Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice between 1486 and 1489; in this leaf, only the Four Winds in the corners are attributed to him.
Excellent condition, slight handling of the leaf in the lower left, untrimmed margins.

Bibliography
Strauss 9a
For the work:
Hain 14508
Goff S-307
GW M40784
ISTC is00307000

Commentary
This is the last of the seven images of the Creation. God is seated on a throne, surrounded by angelic choirs. At the center, the heavens are represented as concentric spheres, each with its own caption, and the signs of the zodiac take the place of the fixed stars of the firmament.
At the four corners, the winds blow, each with its own name: Subsolanus (east), Auster (south), Aparctias (north), and Zephyrus (west).

Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg 1471-1528), the son of a goldsmith of Hungarian origin, from whom he learned the precision of the burin, trained as a painter and woodcut artist in Michael Wolgemut’s workshop between 1486 and 1489. After his years of travel, he made two decisive stays in Venice, in 1494-1495 and 1505-1507, from which he brought back a new idea of proportion and the study of nature. He was a painter, theorist, and above all the greatest engraver of the Northern Renaissance, the artist who elevated printmaking to an unprecedented level of artistic language.
With the Apocalypse of 1498, he brought woodcut to an expressive power never before achieved, and the same intensity can be found in the Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin. Engraving reached its greatest perfection with him in the three celebrated Meisterstiche: Knight, Death and the Devil and Saint Jerome in His Study (1513), and Melencolia I (1514). From around 1497, he signed his prints with the monogram “AD”, present on most of the sheets, which became a recognizable signature throughout Europe and was imitated so extensively that, according to Vasari, Dürer eventually sued Marcantonio Raimondi for falsifying it.