The Circumcision of Christ, from The Life of the Virginc. 1505, published 1511
The infant Christ is brought for circumcision, the rite performed on the eighth day after birth, in a scene from Dürer’s Life of the Virgin, a series of twenty woodcuts. More about this work
About this work
The infant Christ is brought for circumcision, the rite performed on the eighth day after birth, in a scene from Dürer’s Life of the Virgin, a series of twenty woodcuts. He designed most of the blocks in the early 1500s and issued them together as a book in 1511, with Latin verses by the Benedictine monk Benedictus Chelidonius. Dürer’s achievement was to make the woodcut, until then a fairly coarse medium, carry fine hatching, deep architectural space and subtle modelling of light, all cut into the wood from his drawings.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A work made of woodcut in black on tan laid paper.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Woodcut
- A relief print. The block is cut away around the lines, so the lines stand up to take the ink, and the sheet is pressed onto them.
- Laid paper
- Handmade on a mould of close-set wires, which leave fine parallel lines you can see when the sheet is held to the light.
Albrecht Dürer
German, 1471–1528 · Born and died in Nuremberg.
Dürer trained as a goldsmith with his father and then under the Nuremberg painter Michael Wolgemut, whose studio produced woodcut book illustrations. Two journeys to Italy brought him into contact with Venetian painting and the theory of proportion, which he set out to bring north. He raised woodcut and engraving to new heights of detail and ambition, issuing his own series such as The Apocalypse and The Life of the Virgin, and his engraving Adam and Eve of 1504 shows his study of the ideal human figure.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Renaissance
European art from about 1400 to 1600, when painters rediscovered perspective and the classical past.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1927.2895
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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