Albrecht Dürer, The Sudarium of Saint Veronica, 1513, Engraving

Albrecht Dürer 16th Century Old Master Engraving The Sudarium Of Saint Veronica Good condition overall, framed and mounted under protective glass. Dated and signed in the plate with the artist’s monogram on a tablet lower center. A clean & clear 16th century Meder “c” (of d) impression, printed after the appearance of the scratch in the shadow under the arm of the angel on the right. Catalog: Bartsch 25; Dodgson 71; Panofsky 132; Meder 26b; Hollstein 26; Strauss 69; Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum 68. Literature regarding this artwork: Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist, The Britsh Museum Press, 2002, no. 4, p. 82 (ill.) Collections in which impressions of this state of this engraving can be found: Museum of Fine Arts (Department of Prints and Drawings), Boston; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Few Christian legends are better known and more valued than that of St. Veronica, who compassionately wiped the face of Jesus when He fell beneath the load of His cross on the way to Calvary. Nor is that to be wondered at, for it is a most touching story that appeals at once to the heart of every Christian and, in the version which makes her the wife of a Roman officer, is a moving example of contempt of public opinion and human respect. But the legend, though ancient, has only a vague tradition to support it, and the identifications of the woman to whom the name Veronica has been given are several and various. Dürer had worked intensively during the years up to 1513 on his series of Passion woodcuts, but the natural association of this engraving with the prints of the Engraved Passion, to which it would form an appropriate tail-piece, is precluded by the unusual horizontal format. Dürer himself viewed it as a single sheet print, since he refers to it as Veronicum in his diary of the journey to the Netherlands. On two occasions in August of 1520 he gave impressions away as presents. However, the most striking feature of the print, as subsequent artists such as Dürer’s follower Sebald Beham noticed and many commentators have indicated, is the similarity of the frontal gaze of Christ to Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 in Munich. As the scholar Panofsky noted “the features of the Savior bear an unmistakable resemblance to Dürer’s own.” It is one of numerous occasions that Dürer associated the idea of his image with that of Christ. Giorgio Vasari’s of the self-portrait painted on cambric, which the artist sent to Raphael as a gift in about 1515, bears a curious resemblance to the idea of St. Veronica’s sudarium..