Adorazione della Trinità

Around 1510 a wealthy Nuremberg metal merchant named Matthaeus Landauer was setting up an almshouse for 12 elderly craftsmen who could no longer work, with a chapel attached, and he asked Duerer for its altarpiece. What Duerer delivered in 1511 imagines the whole of heaven at once. God the Father holds the crucified Christ, the dove of the Spirit between them, and around them ranks of saints, martyrs and ordinary believers hover in the open sky. Down at the bottom edge, alone on the empty earth, Duerer painted himself standing beside a tablet with his signature, a small figure looking up at the crowd he had conceived. Landauer is up there among the saved, led forward in his fur-trimmed coat. Duerer had come back from Venice a decade earlier, and you can see both worlds in the panel, Italian depth and light against the dense German detail. The elaborate carved frame that once crowned it is now in Nuremberg, separated from the painting for centuries.