Death of the Virgin

This print comes from the Life of the Virgin series that Dürer began shortly after 1500. Based on the Gospel of St. Luke and certain apocryphal writings, this series of nineteen woodcuts plus a title page was published as a book in 1511, with poetry by Dürer’s friend Abbot Benedictus Chelidonius. These prints’ greater complexity and wealth of detail (relative to the Small Woodcut Passion) allowed them to engage the pious sixteenth-century viewer’s imagination, and today give us a window onto domestic life in the Renaissance. In this scene of Mary on her deathbed, Dürer highlights the centrality of the Virgin through emphatic framing devices, the positioning of the other figures turned toward her, and the bed-curtain almost theatrically drawn aside.