Sale 2460 - Old Master Through Modern Prints, November 2, 2017

7 c ALBRECHT DÜRER The Sea Monster . Engraving, before 1500. 251x188 mm; 10x7 3 / 8 inches. A superb, richly- inked Meder c impression with very strong contrasts and no sign of wear, consistent with the earliest impressions of this subject. Gothic letter P watermark (Meder 321, which he dates from the early 1500s). Trimmed on or with thread margins outside the narrow black border line. Dürer (1471-1528) opened his own workshop in the spring of 1495. In the years leading up to this significant development in his career, he had trained extensively during his teens with his father, a talented goldsmith, as well as with the Nuremberg painter-printmaker Michael Wolgemut for three years (1486-89) and traveled widely through southern Germany, Austria and northern Italy, making a journey to Venice and likely Padua and Mantua from the autumn of 1494 to the spring of 1495. According to Bartrum, “He was particularly impressed by the work of artists such as Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Giovanni Bellini (circa 1430/40-1516) and Antonio del Pollaiuolo (circa 1432-1498),” (Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy , London, 2002, page 105). The Sea Monster is, along with Hercules, or the Effects of Jealousy , one of Dürer’s largest and most ambitious engravings of his early career up to around 1500. They are clearly both tour de force printmaking efforts by the young artist— not yet 30 years old—to achieve acclaim and prestige, much like his contemporaneously produced Apocalypse woodcut series (see lot 3). The engravings, however, evince Dürer’s profound emulation of Italianate artistic styles of the time, notably the work of Mantegna. In The Sea Monster , Dürer combines a Germanic setting, there is a view of Nuremberg castle in the background, with a figural group highly inf luenced by, if not lifted directly from, a Mantegna school composition. The nymph who is apparently being abducted by the sea monster also wears an elaborate hair-style that was popular with upper-class Milanese women at the time. Bartrum notes that Dürer sensed early on in his career, during the late 1400s and the opening of his workshop, that printmaking would be his path to financial success and fame, “By choosing to make engravings rather than copy them in singular luxury objects, Dürer could imprint his art on the products of his father’s trade, effectively reversing his filial relation through creative priority . . . Most importantly, he had a highly developed commercial sense; by 1497 he had already hired an agent, Contz Schwytzer, to handle his foreign print sales,” (Bartrum, pages 21 and 106). Bartsch 71; Meder 66. [40,000/60,000]