Erasmus of Rotterdam

Albrecht Dürer

National Gallery of Art

Created with fine black lines printed on cream-white paper, this vertical engraving shows a man facing our left, wearing a cap and voluminous robe as he writes on a sheet of paper. Closest to us and along the bottom edge of the composition, a table or shelf is spread with several books, some upright, some on their sides, and one thick tome laid open. The open book has writing on the pages, but the words are not legible. Beyond the books, the man is shown from the waist up with his body angled to our left. A few curls peek out from the soft, rounded cap that covers his head down to his neck and his forehead, and nearly reaches the top edge of the paper. His face and jowls are deeply lined, and he has deep-set eyes, a long, sloped nose, and his lips are closed. His robe rides high on his shoulders and around his neck, parting at the throat to show a high-collared garment beneath. He gazes down at his hands, which rest on the paper on which he writes. One thick-fingered hand holds the inkwell and the other the pen. The paper and a book underneath it rest on a lectern that angles up toward the writer. The lectern sits on a desk that also holds a short urn with a small bunch of leaves and flowers at the front corner closest to us. Two packets or pieces of folded paper sit next to the lectern. Densely spaced, fine lines create dark shadows in the deep folds of the man’s garments and on the wall behind him. A panel on the wall behind the man reads, in Latin, “IMAGO ERASMI ROTERODA MI AB ALBERTO DVRERO AD VIVAM EFFIGIEM DELINIATA,” which is followed by a Greek inscription, and then, “MDXXXVI.” The artist signed the work with his monogram, consisting of an upper case D straddled by the legs of a wide, upper case A at the bottom center of the panel.