Vintage 1974 Dürer “Adam and Eve” Black and White Art Plate

Vintage 1974 black and white art plate affixed to chipboard backing for maximum ease in styling, propping, or framing.

Image: 7.5” x 9.5”

This engraving is considered by many to be one of Direr's most brilliant achievements. Obviously the artist himself considered it a major effort; for the first time, he engraved his name in Latin and added the date. Five states of the print are known, of which our illustration is the fourth or fifth, and it is interesting to discover the use of a technique adopted by Rembrandt for some of his etchings.

In the earliest state the figures are only outlined, except for Adam's right leg. As Direr progressed, he "worked up" Adam's other limbs and transformed the simple outlines of Eve's form into a fully modeled body.

By 1504, the artist was acquainted with much of the art of the Italian masters, and had seen famous Classical statues of Apollo, Venus, and Mercury. He studied the poses, measurements, and proportions of ancient marbles, and felt a challenge to reproduce this antique beauty. From ugly reality he sought to create the ideal. He studied Vitruvius and worked out geometric proportions, using the compass and the ruler. Just as he had once been challenged by the laws of perspective, he now sought to master the perfect canon for rendering the human figure in all its proportional beauty.

This exquisite print also boasts a degree of the symbolism so dear to the medieval and early Renaissance mind. Erwin Panofsky, in his definitive work on Direr, points out that the cat and mouse at the feet of the figures possibly suggest woman's predatory feline quality and man's weak susceptibility. He goes on to mention the wise parrot contrasted with the evil snake, and the four animals- elk, cat, rabbit, and ox-who represented respectively melancholic gloom, choleric cruelty, sanguine sensuality, and phlegmatic sluggishness to the sixteenth-century viewer. But for most of us today this scene shows an episode from the Old Testament, rendered with a superb feeling for the human form-surely sufficient a message.