With the rise of the Reformation movement, there was an apparent shift in the art industry, both in the portrayal of its subject matter and the process of artwork creation in and of itself. Martin Luther’s conflicting viewpoints regarding art as both a teaching tool and a vanity also helps define the polarity of arts of this era. One stand-out figure of Northern Europe in this time is Albrecht Dürer, the great painter/printmaker that has created some definitive artworks throughout his career.
One of these prints is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a wood-cut print based on the Book of Revelation, depicting four armored figures of Death, Famine, War and Conquest. With highly intricate rendering of the scene and its character, along with a great grasp of human expression and psychology, Dürer was able to capture the imminent wariness of a new century, the condition which had also popularized the rise in interest with apocalyptic themes.
By examining Adam and Eve, his engraving print, we saw Dürer’s capacity for realism and exploration of familiar themes, in this case the moment before the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. In the very choice of subject not being the expulsion itself, we could see somewhat the general overlapping themes with his previously mentioned woodcut, that being impending calamity. In this case, however, the artist chose to depicts some extra theme players, that being the representation of different human temperaments: that of the choleric (the cat), the phlegmatic (the ox), the sanguine (the rabbit) and the melancholic (the elk). This serves as proof of the artist’s capacity to discover the relationship between symbolism and abstract concepts, as well as an interest in the psychology underlying the depicted scene.
Along with his impressive catalogs of prints, the artist was also the creator of several influential portraits, including one of himself, which was loosely modeled after the image of Christ. This is partly due to his own growing ego, and the increasing awareness of artists of their own importance, paralleling God’s creation of the universe and the artists’ ability to create lives via depicting them with their virtuosity.