The death of ten thousand Christians by Albrecht Durer

Durer’s searches pour out into the form of experimental studies. Between 1500 and 1504 he performed a series of drawings of a naked human figure, for which antique monuments served as a prototype. The purpose of these drawings is to find the ideal proportions of the male and female body.

Artistic embodiment of the results of Dürer’s research is the engraving on copper of 1504 Adam and Eve, in which figures from the school drawings are directly transferred. They are only placed in a fairy forest and surrounded by animals.

It is extremely characteristic of Durer that in his finished works of art, most fully embodying his worldview, he only in rare occasions includes the ideal figure of a man found in theoretical pictures. As a rule, an individual person, far from classical norms, reigns with the sharpness of the artist-observer dominates here.