Le Christ parmi les docteurs

Dürer painted this in Venice in 1506, in the middle of a much bigger job. He had come south to build his reputation among the Italians and was busy on a large altarpiece for the German merchants there. This panel he seems to have knocked out on the side, and he left a little note in the painting to say so. On the slip of paper near the bottom he wrote, in Latin, that the work was done in five days. What he crowded into those five days is a ring of hands. The boy Christ, twelve years old, is pressed in among old scholars, and Dürer pushes their heavy, gesturing fingers right up to the front of the picture, close enough to count. The faces around Christ are worn and caricatured, the kind of expressive Italian heads he had been studying. The preparatory drawings for those hands survive in Vienna and Nuremberg, so the five days were the fast part of a slower looking.