Title Page from Lucian's Ratione Conscribendae Historiae (How to Write History)

Albrecht Dürer took obvious pleasure in supplying this design for his best friend, Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530). Pirckheimer was a wealthy, erudite statesman and one of Nuremberg's leading humanists. He translated Greek with ease, including Lucian's essay How to Write History, apparently done to encourage Germans to record their past. The birch tree crest held by putti is Pirckheimer's emblem (the German birke, meaning birch, is a play on his name). It is Pirckheimer who inscribed Dürer's famous epitaph: Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb.