Sol Justitiae

Dürer engraved this small plate around 1499, when many in Germany expected the end of the world to come with the turn of the century, and it shows the Last Judgement as one single figure. Christ sits on the back of a lion, a sword raised in one hand and a pair of scales in the other, and his face blazes like the sun. The idea starts with the prophet Malachi, who promised that the sun of righteousness would rise, Sol Justitiae in Latin. The picture itself Dürer took from a preacher's handbook, the Repertorium morale of the 14th-century French monk Pierre Bersuire. Bersuire wrote that on the day of judgement Christ would appear burning and grim, fierce and like a lion, and would wither the sinners as the summer sun scorches the grass. The lion carries an astrological meaning too. Leo was the sign of high summer, when the sun burns hottest, and astrologers called it the sun's own house. So one figure is at once Christ, the ancient sun god and Justice holding her scales. The plate is only about 10 centimetres high, and the Boston sheet is one impression of it. Before it came to Boston in 1897 it belonged to Wilhelm August Ackermann, a 19th-century collector of prints in Lübeck and Dresden.