Christ in Limbo

These prints from Dürer’s Engraved Passion series were hand colored in 1588 by the Nuremburg colorist Georg Mack the Elder, who added his initials in gold. Today, seven sheets from the series with matching illuminated mounts and manuscript texts on their versos are known, which suggests that all sixteen prints from the series were painted and bound together as a personal prayer book. Mack applied pigments and gold and silver highlights that correspond to Dürer’s printed lines. Together the prints and their decorated mounts evoke the look and feel of an illuminated manuscript. These innovative, hybrid objects thus function as a bridge between earlier handwork traditions of the Middle Ages and the letterpress books that revolutionized the dissemination of texts in Renaissance Europe.