The Knight, Death and the Devil

The Knight, Death and the Devil.

A 2018 reinterpretation by G. Sfougaras.

Part of Leicester Museum's Permanent Collection.

Presentation at House Ohrbeck, Osnabrük June 2019

Haus Ohrbeck is both an adult educational institution and a conference centre 

run jointly by the Franciscan Order and the diocese of Osnabrück.

A Reevaluation 

Leicester Museum January 25th 2025 10.00 am and January 30th 17.00. 

Engraving on paper measuring 24 x18 cm 1513

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

It is hard not to feel humbled when one sees Durer’s amazing Knight, Death and the Devil engraving. It is a remarkable piece of work, elegant, brave and subtle despite the subject matter. There is mastery in the drawing, but even more so in the execution. The textures are beautifully depicted and the mark making is impeccable. The softness of the marks on the horse compared to the harshness of the marks on the landscape and the texture of the armour are unsurpassable.

Much has been written about the symbolism associated with the elements of this work, and it remains undoubtedly one of Durer’s masterpieces, but also one of the most important works of the Renaissance. A heavily armoured knight, clearly based on careful observation of the components and articulation of the armour, rides through the bleak landscape. He rides a powerful horse that moves its muscular body with power and restraint. They move through the gorge flanked by a goat-headed devil and the figure of death riding a pale horse. Death's rotting corpse holds an hourglass, a reminder of the shortness of life. The figure of the devil is made as abhorrent as possible, asymmetrically crowned by a vile looking horn. His face is an amalgam of wolf, pig and goat details. The knight moves past these creatures without acknowledging their presence, accompanied by his faithful dog. It is speculated that the fortress on the mountain and the knight’s armour, his powerful horse and his demeanour represent both of the resilience of faith, and Christians' earthly journey towards the Kingdom of Heaven.

The work was mentioned by Giorgio Vasari as one of "several sheets of such excellence that nothing finer can be achieved”. It was widely copied and had a large influence on later German writers. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referenced the work in his work on dramatic theory The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to exemplify pessimism, while it was later idealised in the 20th century by the Nazis as representing the racially pure Aryan, and was alluded to in their propaganda imagery.

The image, the symbolism, its unfortunate and evil misuse and the quality of the overall composition, drew me to the work as much as numerous interpretations of this work.

Further research revealed that the fortified city on the hill is based on Nuremberg, Durer’s birthplace, and for many centuries a significant cultural crucible for the Germanic peoples. Nuremberg is often referred to as having been the 'unofficial capital' of the Holy Roman Empire, particularly because Imperial Diet (Reichstag) and courts met at Nuremberg Castle. 

The Diets of Nuremberg were an important part of the administrative structure of the empire. Nuremberg was, according to the first documentary mention of the city in 1050, the location of an Imperial castle between the East Franks and the Bavarian March of the Nordgau.

From 1050 to 1571, the city expanded and rose dramatically in importance due to its location on key trade routes. The cultural flowering of Nuremberg, in the 15th and 16th centuries, made it the centre of the German Renaissance. In the 1800s Nuremberg grew to become the most important industrial city of Bavaria and one of the most prosperous towns of southern Germany. Nuremberg held great significance during the Nazi Germany era. Because of the city's history and its position in the centre of Germany, the Nazi Party chose the city to be the site of huge Nazi Party conventions — the Nuremberg rallies. Between 1945 and 1946, German officials involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity were brought before an international tribunal in the Nuremberg trials.

Detailed Interpretation.

The work was created while Dürer was in the service of Emperor Maximilian but was not a commission and does not contain an overtly political message. Instead, it reaches back to a medieval sense of morality and is replete with Gothic imagery.

 The engraving bears similarities in mood and tone to one of Dürer's other great prints Melencolia. The knight seems resigned, and his facial features are downcast. His gloomy posture is in contrast to the sturdy look of his horse. While his armour may protect him against the surrounding demons, the skull on a stump is held in front of the horse and the fall of the sand held by death in the face of the knight. According to writer Dorothy Getlein, "there is a sense of obsolescence about the knight accompanied by Death and the Devil."

The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter noted that the composition followed soon after Dürer's beloved mother died a painful death. Austrian 19th-century art historian Moritz Thausing suggested that Dürer had created Knight, Death and the Devil as part of a four-work cycle, each designed to illustrate one of the four temperaments. According to Thausing, the work was intended to represent sanguinity, hence the "S" engraved in the work.  It is generally believed that the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, celebration of the knight's Christian faith, and also of the ideals of humanism.

An alternative interpretation was presented in 1970 by writer Sten Karling, who suggested that the work did not seek to glorify the knight, but instead depict a "robber Baron". Karling points to the lack of Christian or religious symbolism in the work and to the fox's tail wrapped on top the knight's lance – in Greek legend the fox's tail was a symbol of greed, cunning and treachery, as well as lust and whoring. However, knights were commonly depicted in contemporary art with a foxtail tied to the tip of their lance. Moreover, the foxtail was a common form of protective amulet.  The work is considered one among three of Dürer's "Meisterstiche" (master prints); along with Saint Jerome in His Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514).[10] In particular, the horse is skillfully rendered in geometric shapes that call to mind Leonardo da Vinci and reflect the Renaissance interest in natural sciences and anatomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight,_Death_and_the_Devil

The following is from the Royal Collection Trust, where a copy of the print has been housed since 1810.

This virtuoso engraving by Dürer shows a lone knight riding through an oppressive landscape. A dog runs at his horse’s feet, and Death holds aloft an hourglass while the Devil stalks behind. Although the meaning of this print has not been satisfactorily explained, it is clear that the message is an ominous one. A skull, a reminder of death, lies on a tree trunk in the left foreground, and a lizard, sometimes seen as a harbinger of danger, scuttles to the right. The figures in the foreground are enclosed by the rocky landscape and the brittle, dead trees. A city seen atop a mountain in the distance further serves to emphasise the knight’s isolation from society. Dürer’s image captured imaginations from the moment of its publication.

Giorgio Vasari interpreted the central figure as representing ‘Human Strength’, and commented on the ‘lustre of the arms and of the black horse’s coat’. In the nineteenth century it was suggested that the print is an illustration of Erasmus’s influential text, the 'Handbook of a Christian Knight', published in 1503, which urged Christians to act as soldiers, combating temptation and malevolence with faith.

The print also evokes the 23rd Psalm: ‘though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil’ (Psalms 23:4). Along with 'St Jerome in his study' and the 'Melancholia', the ‘Rider’, as Dürer himself described this print, is one of three so-called master engravings ('Meisterstiche') produced by Dürer over the space of around a year between 1513 and 1514.

Each of these was engraved on a plate of a similarly large size and all demonstrated Dürer’s ability to create a range of effects with the burin (the tool with which a plate is engraved). Although various theories have been advanced, there is no evidence that Dürer himself regarded the three 'Meisterstiche' as a set - the diary of his journey to the Netherlands shows that he gave them away separately rather than together, or paired 'St Jerome' with the 'Melancholia' but without the 'Knight'.

Dürer used a number of sources in his composition, among them a drawing of a mounted knight he had made 15 years earlier and studies of a dog and the proportions of a horse. It has been suggested that the pose of the knight was inspired by equestrian statues in Italy, particularly the monument commemorating Bartolommeo Colleoni, which Dürer must have seen during his stay in Venice, c.1505-7. Certainly, the pose of the horse, the decoration on its poll and the sallet helmet worn by the knight are very close to the Colleoni statue, which was erected in 1494. Dürer may also have seen Donatello’s 1453 equestrian monument to the condottierre Gattamelata (Erasmo of Narni) in nearby Padua, and he may well have known, directly or through copies, studies by Leonardo da Vinci for the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza (on which Leonardo was working around 1490). Catalogue entry adapted from 'The Northern Renaissance. Dürer to Holbein', London 2011.

https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/the-northern-renaissance-durer-to-holbein/the-queens-gallery-buckingham-palace/a-knight-death-and-the-devil

My 2018 version.

Originally, I was simply fascinated by the technical mastery evident in this work, and my intention was to copy parts of it. I seldom do many preparatory sketches nowadays. My work is instead tried and tested on the final version. Similarly, in this piece, I started by copying the main elements in the composition straight on to the heritage paper measuring 95 x68 cm.

My subconscious reasons for this became clearer as I worked on this scale and was able to include elements of detail (particularly under the horse) which would have been impossible in a smaller piece.  I allowed my imagination to take over for a while whilst I reimagined specific elements of the image. The significance of Nuremberg in modern history was hugely influential and the path to it over the hills and the small wooded area to the left became littered with gravestones. They are graves of many denominations, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. The reason for this is that in death we are all reconciled, we are all equal.  This is a theme I explored in previous work (‘Lazarus’ 2018). There is no escaping the fact, however, that these are mainly Jewish stones. I have a strong memory from my visit to Prague of the Jewish graveyard and the way that the gravestones were at various angles due to years of neglect.  Our local Victorian cemetery in Leicester has been vandalised in the past and the headstones lay at odd angles as they appear in various states of collapse.  

In my hometown of Heraklion,  a cluster of Ottoman gravestones still lie near the newly refurbished museum, where for the last fifty years or so have shared this public wire enclosure with beer cans and other rubbish thrown over the fence.  My sense of order and propriety (such as they are) are probably more offended by this show of disrespect than many other things directed towards the living. 

Concurrent with the making of this work, I was reading several books. One of the books was ‘The Choice’ by Edith Eger. This book talks about the Holocaust but from a very different perspective. One that resonates with me and what I know about working with young people who have experienced trauma. Namely that the pain must be acknowledged, but it must not define you. Edith Eger talks of the unspeakable horrors of the camps, but also of everyone’s capacity for good and for evil.  She remembers, hurts, but forgives, so that she can heal herself and others.

A lot of my work is about this anomaly.  We cannot avoid pain and in order to heal we must acknowledge it, not bury it.  This work became about this need to stare at truth and to be steadfast in the face of it. Death, Evil, Loss, Displacement. They are depicted in the work, departing from Durer’s engraving, but referring to it and connecting elements from both his and my versions. This was facilitated by the fact that Durer’s work and subject matter are timeless.  It is a wise work, not just a brilliant work.  The human condition remains unchanged despite the immense changes that society has undergone.

Technique

It occurred to me that if I was to really feel a sense of real connection with this work, I had to fully understand the effort involved in making it. Of course, my version would be in pen and ink, not as an engraving. I started with a fine 0.1 nib archival ink pen (Staedler and Pigma pigment liners), but it soon became apparent that I needed a finer point, so I switched to a 0.05 nib. This enabled me to create much subtler lines.  Using the pen in a particular way also allows the most delicate marks as in the fox pelt. Counterintuitively, such fine lines are much easier to achieve when the pen carries less ink, as is the case when some drying has occurred, or when it is nearing its functional end. 

The piece took ten days, working, thinking and planning full time. Even dream did not get in the way, as the work of the day and subsequent steps intruded in the early hours.  I really felt, as I do with a lot of my pieces that I needed to complete it in one go.  This immersion in the work keeps me telling the story that I feel in a way that I cannot sustain over longer periods when I am involved in other projects or working on something else at the same time.

As I worked on the drawing, I realised the enormity of the practical task that lay ahead of me. The A1 paper loomed large and its white expanse was hardly touched after many days of drawing. After a week had elapsed, I had covered over half of the intended area. I estimated that each day I covered approximately 18 or so square cm of the surface. Progress became slower as I started to realise that my directional hatching needed further refinement. Areas had to be reworked and brought into a tonal range that was in keeping with what was already on the paper from the previous day. I started to use powdered graphite to achieve additional tonal variance over certain areas.  The act of drawing became more and more meditative and focused as well as physical, over many hours of leaning over the work.

All that is familiar to me, having worked on complex drawings before. I started to contemplate but also to dream as I said earlier what would strengthen the message; what would make this work more poignant, more meaningful for our times. It was a constant throughout the period of execution and I was acutely aware that I had to stay in role, so to speak.  By that, I mean that the feelings and the story that were playing out in my mind as I worked on this piece, had to remain alive and constant. It may not be an obvious thing, but unless the narrative is working for me, the act of translating it into a visual object loses its potency.  

Death

I did not know what I let myself in for when I started this piece. I drew the outline of the knight, the horse and the hills, and contemplated the remaining components. I decided early on that I needed to work left to right in an effort to avoid damaging the drawing as it progressed. I drew the graves from imagination and memory, including an old open grave in a Cretan village that let below to a crypt. I had an easy time of it as the shapes came easily and needed little surface detail to define them. As I moved up the hills and towards the figure of death, it started to get much more challenging technically. 

I wanted a figure which defined the way I imagine death to be and the way that death is described in literature that I am currently reading. Namely literature about starvation and about bodily functions that we normally avoid discussing. Death became a sickly face, his/her eyes closing through exhaustion.  The face is beginning to thin out as illness progresses. The halo that surrounds his /her face is made up of coiled forms. In Durer’s work, the decaying head of death is flanked by snakes. Here I have turned those coiled forms into intestines.  Starvation and digestion become the two main instruments of my death figure. The body is made up of skulls, being incinerated.  Behind him/her a cloud of acrid smoke and a crowd of people. Prisoners? Victims of starvation? In my mind, Edith Eger’s account of the camps persists.

The Devil

Durer’s animalistic devil is powerful and abhorrent, but there is another evil which scares me more.  As I write this, newspaper articles proliferate about the rise of the right. Germany and Eastern Europe, the very places where camps reduced millions of people to ashes are showing signs of extremism. My devil (Satan somehow seems more sinister) is a figure that is based on a repugnant combination of right-wing officialdom, mythical goat-horned Satan and repugnant facial features, mouth overshadowed by sharp appendages. His coat is made of hyena fur, for I could think of nothing that compares to that sense of dread as packs of hyenas move in for the kill, or devour rotting animals. In his left hand, he holds a wooden flagpole. This flag is made of stylised flames and acrid smoke.  It is the flag of destruction, of hate and evil. To the right of the picture, a dark sea washes out an empty vessel. There is no sign of the passengers.

The Knight

I felt that the symbolism of the body armour is timeless.  I was drawn to the detail of the actual panoply by Durer; he had striven to depict its function and articulation, not just the form.  One of the questions I used to ask my students when they drew an unfamiliar object descriptively, was ‘’would you be able to make a three-dimensional version of this object using your drawing as a guide?’’ I could almost completely get the way that the components of the armour are joined and how it may be fastened together and attached to the wearer. Any details that were not clear to me were obscured by the resolution of the highest resolution images I could obtain.  

Propaganda poster. The SS of the Third Reich were seen as a modern equivalent of Germany's Ancient Teutonic Knights.

 Propaganda Poster Showing Hitler as a Knight (“The Standard Bearer” [1935] by Hubert Lanzinger)

The emotional aspect and the obsessive engagement involved in making the work were starting to take a toll by day eight. By then I had the majority of the image covered, apart from the area under the horse and in the foreground. It was there that I wanted my most personal and contemplative narrative.  Contemporary, yet timeless. Human migration; the endless exodus of people often displaced by war, by famine, by injustice and by misguided ideals. I did very briefly toy with the idea of clothing the knight in a modern armoured uniform of a riot policeman or a bomb disposal operative, but the image did not appeal to me in the same intense way that the original did. The association of the knight figure with images of the Conquistadores evoked the sense of a colonising force; a man who armed with superior weapons and fully protected easily trampled over the indigenous peoples and subdued any effort of resistance.  Images of knights also evoke the Crusades which unleashed terrible destruction on Eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews alike, in the name of a Holy War.   The Third Reich used the image of the knight in many of their posters, capitalising on its established symbolism with crusades and colonisation. The knight became a symbol of Teutonic superiority as shown in the two images above. So it was both important and painful to retain this part of Durer’s image and work with or subvert its associations.

This subject has evolved in my work since the making of the first image that referred to displaced peoples seeking refuge and hope in 2015. I have addressed the subject in a number of ways, through imagery captured from the media, through archival research and family stories. I wanted all the faces to be portraits, not amalgams or random people. This required considerable research and preliminary drawings prior to committing the faces to pen and ink.  

The People

In the crowds that jostle under the belly of the knight’s horse, I included demoralised Greek people leaving the slaughter of the 1922 conflict. Among them, a little portrait of me. I was not involved then, but my life has been affected by the experiences of my parents and their families.  Near them, African escaping the ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Jewish survivors, and Syrian refugees.  Times have changed, yet millions of our fellow humans suffer loss and humiliation, lose their homes, loved ones and face an uncertain future.

The foreground

On day ten as I was nearing completion, three objects and their meanings were incorporated. From right to left: books symbolising knowledge and the ignorance of history, at our peril. The world map a metaphor for the small planet we occupy and how our world can so easily be destroyed by violence and hate.  Finally, the dahlias. I wanted to symbolise fragile hope. The symbolism of the dahlias:  staying graceful under pressure, especially in challenging situations; drawing upon inner strength to succeed; traveling and making a major life change in a positive way. The skulls are symbols of our ephemeral selves, the one to the left near the date plaque borrowed from Durer, the one in the centre, a small child’s skull was placed there by me. It is possibly the saddest part of the composition.  

Finally, four shadows are cast from various angles upon the foreground. They represent the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Each comes from an unexpected direction. One is the shadow of a survivor.  Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the Four Horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.

Overall, I felt a sense of achievement at the completion of this work. There are things that I learned that I had not anticipated, particularly about the complexity of large curvilinear surfaces that need to be formed through cross hatching. About the quality of the marks and the complexity of superimposing new meaning onto a work that is one of the best, if not the best of its kind. I know that the mere attempt would seem presumptuous to many.  I know that I cannot hope to compete with Durer’s mastery; all the same, I felt a sense of achievement that I was able to respond to his work and achieve a piece which met some of my aims and which communicated my intended message.

 The words of Victor Frankl echoed throughout this process:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

George Sfougaras November 2018.