Lot and His Daughters [reverse]

This is the back of a panel. On the front is a Madonna and Child, painted in Nuremberg somewhere between 1496 and 1499 for a private household, and both faces are finished pictures, so the thing was made to be turned and looked at from either side. Dürer was working in those same years on the woodcuts of the Apocalypse, published in 1498, sheets full of fire falling out of the sky onto the world, in a decade when plenty of people in Germany expected the end to arrive around the year 1500. Here Lot leaves Sodom with his two daughters, the cities going up in bright bursts behind them, and far back along the road his wife stands where she turned to look and became a pillar of salt. Putting that story on the reverse of a Virgin and Child is very unusual, and what the two sides were meant to say together has never been settled.