The Holy Family with the Mayfly

Albrecht Dürer

National Gallery of Art

Printed with fine black lines and velvety black shading on off-white paper, a woman sits holding a baby as a bearded man sleeps nearby in a landscape in this vertical engraving. In the center of the composition, the woman sits with her knees angled slightly to our right, but she turns to look down at the baby, held in her arms to our left so they are almost chin to chin. She has hooded eyes, a straight, a short nose, thin lips, and a slight double chin. Long wavy hair falls behind her shoulders, and her dress has a high neckline and voluminous sleeves and skirt under a cloak. Facing the woman in profile, we see the child's chubby arm, leg, and cheek, and his eyelashes are silhouetted against the blank white paper. The woman and child sit on the low, wood-plank wall of a trough-shaped container planted with grasses and weeds. To our left, the sleeping man leans one arm up onto the wall and tips his head back, eyes closed. Hills roll back to a structure with a single-sided, steeply pitched roof to the left, and a waterway winds into the distance to the right. A bridge connects the two areas of land and leads to buildings on the farther bit of earth. One person stands and propels a low boat with a long stick and three sailboats are in the water in the deep distance. In the sky above and tiny in relation to the others, a bearded man wearing a robe is shown from the waist up in a bank of clouds. Just in front of him, a bird has its wings spread and rays below that reach down toward the woman. The man holds one hand up, palm facing out with the first two fingers raised, and holds an orb topped wit ha cross with the other hand. The artist signed the print with a lowercase letter d tucked between the long legs of an uppercase letter A at the bottom center.