The Great Horse

Albrecht Dürer was so revered by his students that one of them requested and received a lock of the artist's hair after his death. In his teaching, Dürer preached the importance of proper proportion, both human and equine, which he sought to perfect during his entire career. More remarkable than the musculature and massive bulk of the animal depicted in The Great Horse, however, is the dramatic foreshortening of its body. To underscore the point, Dürer biographer Erwin Panofsky asks us to imagine the horse's size if viewed from the side.