The Virgin and Child with the Monkey

Albrecht Dürer

National Gallery of Art

Printed with fine black lines and velvety black shading on off-white paper, a woman, baby, and monkey sit in a landscape with a body of water and a house on the far bank 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 at her other hip. She has hooded eyes, a straight, thin nose, thin lips, and a rounded, narrow chin. Long wavy hair falls behind her shoulders, and her dress has a square neckline and voluminous sleeves and skirt. The sleeve of her left arm, to our right, is pushed up to the elbow, and that hand rests on the spin of a book. The nude child leans into her other hand, looking at a bird he holds by the legs. The child has short, curly hair, round cheeks, and a pudgy body. With his other hand, he holds up a small sack pierced with holes to the bird, which flaps its wings wide. The monkey crouches at the woman’s right foot, to our left, and comes almost to her knee. The animal’s eyes slant dramatically up at the outer corners, and a blaze of fur surrounds its face. It is tied around the middle and tethered to an iron ring affixed to a low, wooden, garden wall. The woman and child sit in the corner of the wall, which continues toward us to the right. Sailboats dot the water, which leads back to a tiny, distant town and mountains on the horizon. In the top third of the print, puffy and screens of clouds span the sky. The artist signed the print with his initials, an uppercase “D” tucked between the long legs of an uppercase “A” in the lower center.