Die Beweinung Christi

Around 1498 a Nuremberg patrician named Karl Holzschuher commissioned this for his family's chapel, where it would hang as an epitaph over the dead. That purpose shaped everything in it. The body of Christ is laid out on the ground while his mother and friends gather close, and the setting behind them is not the Holy Land but the towers and rocky hills of Franconia, the world the mourners actually knew. Dürer was still in his twenties and had recently returned from a first trip over the Alps into Italy. The monogram on the white shroud was added later by another hand, so the small AD that visitors look for is not the artist's own.