La Fête du Rosaire

Durer painted this in Venice in 1506, and he had something to prove. Italians treated northern artists as mere craftsmen, and he wanted to show he could paint colour and figures as grandly as any of them. The commission came from the German merchants living in Venice, for their church on the Rialto, and it shows the Virgin handing out rose garlands, with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor kneeling among the crowd. Over on the right, standing apart under a tree and looking straight out at you, is Durer himself, holding a slip of paper that records how long the work took. A century later Emperor Rudolf II wanted it so badly he had it carried over the Alps to Prague. It reached him damaged, and much of what you see now was heavily repainted in the 1800s.