Jabach Altar: Piper and Drummer

For a long time the two musicians here were read as tormentors. An old German name for the scene calls it the mocking of Job, and the pipe and the drum were taken to be played at the sick man to jeer at him. The art historian Bodo Brinkmann argued the opposite, and the museum now follows him. Around 1500 loud, cheerful music counted as a treatment for melancholy, and these two have come to help. Job is not in this picture. He sits on the other half of it, now in Frankfurt, while his wife tips a pail of water over his sores, and the altarpiece was taken apart long ago and its wings split between three cities. Dürer painted the whole thing somewhere between 1503 and 1505. The drummer has Dürer's own face, and he has turned away from Job to look out of the picture instead.