Lady on Horseback and Lansquenet

In the 1490s a new kind of soldier was on the roads of the German lands. The Landsknechte were hired foot soldiers, raised in large companies under the Emperor Maximilian, paid by whoever could afford them and known for their swagger and their extravagant clothes. Around 1496 or 1497 the young Dürer set one of them beside a lady on horseback in this small engraving, not quite 11 centimetres tall. He stands on foot with a long halberd. She rides above him in rich dress. The Art Institute of Chicago reads the pair as an unlikely romance between a noblewoman and a mercenary, and points to her hat. It is not a woman's hat of the period at all but his, the feathered hat that belonged to the soldier's costume, and wearing it, mounted high above him, she is plainly the one in charge. The Boston sheet is one impression of the print, and the stamps of its owners on the back trace a long route. One of them belongs to the British Museum, which acquired it with the great Malcolm collection of drawings and prints in the 1890s and later sold it as a duplicate, since it already owned another impression from the same plate.