The Small Woodcut Passion
Albrecht Dürer
1511
- Medium
- Woodcut and letterpress in black, with additions in pen and brown ink on cream laid paper, in modern full red calfskin, sewn on raised bands, with blind fillets around inner-edges of boards, blind lines and gold titling on the spine, and hand-sewn silk headbands
- Dimensions
- 15.9 × 11.9 cm (6 5/16 × 4 11/16 in.)
- Genre
- woodcut
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
prints and drawingwoodcut (process)woodcutbookpaper (fiber product)
About
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.
