
1511
Opposite Dürer’s woodcut The Crucifixion (folio C viii verso), a sixteenth-century viewer honed in on this sacred event. He inscribed several lines personalizing his experience of the print below the monk Benedict Cheledonius’s text, where there was room: In Cruce pendentem / rogo te Deum omnipotentem / ut mihi des mentem / te semper amare volentem (I ask you, omnipotent God, hanging on the Cross, that you grant me a mind wishing always to love you). This seems like an intimately pious, original outburst, as it addresses Christ directly, but it actually quotes a well-known Latin prayer from the Hours of the Cross.