Knight, Death, and the Devil

This print and two others, St. Jerome in his Study and Melancholia I, are generally considered the high point of Dürer’s own elaboration of a medieval classification of the virtues as operating in three different spiritual areas: moral, theological, and intellectual. The theme of Christian humanistic morality of this print further derives from Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier (published in 1504). Dürer’s classically proportioned Christian knight and his mount here progress steadfastly forward with moral rectitude, unflinchingly indifferent to the grotesque phantasms conjured up in a wild and menacing Northern landscape.