Le Chevalier, la Mort et le Diable

This is not a painting but an engraving, cut into a copper plate in 1513, one of three large prints Dürer made in a stretch when he nearly stopped painting altogether to see how far the burin could go. A knight in full armour rides steadily through a rocky gorge, looking straight ahead. Beside him Death sits on a pale horse and lifts an hourglass to remind him the sand is running out, and behind him a goat-snouted devil creeps along, waiting for him to flinch. The knight does not flinch. Dürer built the horse out of careful geometry, the kind of study of proportion he had picked up from Italy, and the whole idea answers a book by the scholar Erasmus about the Christian holding to virtue through a rough and threatening world. Look low on the plate and you find Dürer's monogram on a small tablet, next to a human skull.