The Small Horse

Dürer dated this engraving 1505 on the wall above a smoking brazier, and in the same year he made a companion plate, The Large Horse, so that the two animals could be set side by side. Here the horse stands in profile in a cramped stone space, one foreleg lifted, its tail bound up in a knot. Beside it walks a soldier in a fantastical helmet shaped like a butterfly, with little wings at his boots and a pike in his hand. People have tried to name him as Mercury or as Perseus, and neither identification has won agreement. The art historian Erwin Panofsky read the whole scene as an allegory. The spirited animal stands for the appetites of the body, the flame in the brazier for the light of reason, and the wall that blocks the horse's way has the feel of a prison, the control the mind keeps over the senses. The side-on pose with the raised hoof goes back to the bronze horses of antiquity, a pose Italian sculptors such as Donatello had brought back to life a few decades earlier. The Boston sheet is one impression among the many pulled from this plate. The museum's register records its arrival in April 1882, a gift of the Boston collector George Washington Wales.