만 명의 순교

Frederick the Wise, the Saxon prince who would later shield Martin Luther, was a relic collector, and among his holdings were bones said to belong to ten thousand Christians martyred long ago on a mountain in Persia. In 1508 he had Duerer paint their story for his church in Wittenberg. The panel is crowded with cruelty, figures crucified, beaten, thrown off a cliff, killed in every corner of a rocky landscape, and Duerer dressed the persecuting king and his men as Ottoman Turks, the feared enemy of Duerer's own day rather than antiquity. Then, right in the middle of the slaughter, he put himself. Two men in black walk calmly through it all, untouched, and one of them holds a small sign with the date and Duerer's name, looking out as if none of the horror around him is happening. The friend beside him is thought to be the humanist scholar Conrad Celtes, who had died that same year.