Five Lansquenets and an Oriental on Horseback

Nobody is quite sure what is happening in this small engraving, made around 1495, soon after Dürer came home to Nuremberg from his first stay in Venice. Five foot soldiers stand together, and among them is a rider in a turban, the figure the title calls an Oriental. Early writers saw a band of robbers here, or the Swiss hero William Tell. A more recent suggestion is that Dürer first meant it as a group of onlookers beneath the Cross. That reading would explain the rider, since German pictures of the Crucifixion in those years often set turbaned horsemen in the crowd at Calvary, a familiar way of placing the scene in the Holy Land. The Italian influence in the figures is easy to feel, though the grouping is a little stiff and the horseman sits awkwardly among the men on foot. Boston owns one impression of the engraving, one of many printed from the same small copper plate. On every one of them the rider's saddlecloth is covered in a checked pattern that looks remarkably like a Scottish plaid.