The Rich Man and the Devil (The Rich Man on his Deathbed)

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus comes from the Gospel of Luke and describes the grim fate of "a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day." Heinrich Aldegrever’s lively version of this moralizing subject comprises five engravings; in this middle plate in the sequence, the rich man, dying, concentrates his attention on a demon stealing his worldly goods and ignores the scripture being held out to him as well as his bereft wife and children kneeling at right. The final two scenes in this series illustrate the rich man’s descent into hell. Whereas the first two scenes are loosely based on engravings by Sebald Beham, this composition draws upon Dürer’s Death of the Virgin. Aldegrever, Beham, and their fellow "Little Master" Georg Pencz helped perpetuate the printmaking culture that Dürer had established in Nuremberg in the previous generation.