# Knight, Death and the Devil > Albrecht Durer - 1513 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/albrecht-durer/durer-knight-death-and-the-devil/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Albrecht Durer - **Date:** 1513 - **Medium:** Engraving on laid paper - **Dimensions:** 24.8 x 19 cm (9.7 x 7.4 in.), this impression (National Gallery of Art, 1941.1.20) - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** German, early sixteenth century (Northern Renaissance) - **Current location:** National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A knight in full armor rides through a narrow, rock-choked ravine, a dog trotting at his horse's heels, while a corpse-faced figure of Death holds up an hourglass on one side and a goat-horned devil shadows him on the other. Engraved by Albrecht Durer in 1513, it is one of his three so-called Meisterstiche, or master engravings, and its meaning has been argued over for five centuries: is the rider an undistracted Christian soldier, a reading tied to Erasmus of Rotterdam's Handbook of the Christian Soldier, or something closer to a Raubritter, one of the armed robber-knights who genuinely terrorized merchants and towns in Durer's Holy Roman Empire.This record follows one specific sheet, the impression at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, accession 1941.1.20, engraved on laid paper and catalogued as Meder no. 74, state a. Its documented ownership runs from the nineteenth-century Silesian collector Count Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg to the Boston-area print collector W.G. Russell Allen, who gave it to the Gallery in 1941. It is not the same object as the Gallery's second impression of the same plate (Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.3519), nor the Metropolitan Museum's impression (43.106.2), both of which are shown here only for comparison.Durer himself never called it 'Knight, Death and the Devil.' In his own account book he referred to it simply as 'the Knight,' and the now-standard title is a later descriptive label, not an inscription on the plate or a documented title of the artist's choosing. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1513** Albrecht Durer, Nuremberg `[documented]` (origin) Engraved and printed by the artist in his own Nuremberg workshop, 1513. Durer continued to sell and trade impressions of the plate for years afterward, including as late as 1520-1521 on his journey to the Netherlands. - **-1865** Count Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg (1805-1865), Klein Ols, Silesia `[documented]` (collection) Owned by Yorck von Wartenburg, a major nineteenth-century collector of German prints (collector's mark Lugt 2669), by the date of his death in 1865 at the latest. When or how he acquired this sheet is not recorded in the sources consulted. - **1865** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented between Yorck von Wartenburg's death in 1865 and this sheet's appearance in W.G. Russell Allen's collection. The Yorck von Wartenburg collection is known to have been dispersed at auction by Boerner, Leipzig, on 2 and 3 May 1932, but this record has found no confirmation that this specific impression passed through that sale. - **-1941** W.G. Russell Allen (1882-1955), Boston area `[documented]` (collection) Allen was one of five collectors who jointly gave roughly 400 prints, including this sheet, to the National Gallery of Art in 1941, laying part of the foundation of its print collection. - **1941-present** National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. `[documented]` (gift) Accession 1941.1.20, gift of W.G. Russell Allen, 1941. ## Open questions - Is the rider a steadfast Christian soldier or an ambiguous, possibly sinister Raubritter figure? Named scholars hold both positions and the debate remains unresolved. - By what route, if any, did this specific sheet pass from Count Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg's collection to W.G. Russell Allen? The Yorck von Wartenburg collection was dispersed at Boerner, Leipzig, on 2 and 3 May 1932, but the National Gallery's own provenance note does not confirm this impression passed through that sale, and no intervening owner or dealer is documented here. - Did Durer himself conceive the three Meisterstiche as a deliberate conceptual trilogy, or is the moral, theological and intellectual reading a scholastic framework applied afterward by Lippmann and Panofsky? No statement from Durer himself on the question has been found. - Are the reported 1927 and 1933 Nazi-era appropriations of this print (the Rosenberg rally comparison and the Hitler gift) documented in an archival transcript or peer-reviewed study, or do they rest only on repeated secondary paraphrase? This record could not verify them beyond encyclopedic sources. - What did a single impression of this print actually sell for in Durer's own lifetime? His 1520-1521 account book records only bundled and bartered transactions, never a per-sheet price, so no period value for the print alone can currently be established. ## Sources - [1] National Gallery of Art, object page for Knight, Death and Devil, accession 1941.1.20. - [2] National Gallery of Art, object page for Knight, Death and Devil, accession 1943.3.3519 (Rosenwald Collection). - [3] National Gallery of Art, provenance note, 'Count Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg.' - [4] National Gallery of Art, provenance note, 'Mr. W.G. Russell Allen.' - [5] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record, accession 43.106.2 (objectID 336223). - [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record for Saint Jerome in His Study, accession 19.73.68 (objectID 336229). - [7] Rijksmuseum, object page for Knight, Death, and the Devil, accession RP-P-OB-1269. - [8] Cleveland Museum of Art, object page for Knight, Death, and the Devil, accession 1965.231. - [9] Wikimedia Commons, File:Albrecht Durer, Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, NGA 598.jpg, imageinfo and licence (CC0). - [10] Wikimedia Commons, File:Albrecht Durer, Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, NGA 6637.jpg, imageinfo and licence (CC0). - [11] Wikipedia, 'Knight, Death and the Devil.' Tertiary source consolidating the interpretive debate and reception history. Flagged for replacement with Panofsky's monograph and the named journal articles it cites. - [12] Wikipedia (German), 'Ritter, Tod und Teufel.' Tertiary source; cites Werner Steigmaier, Friedrich Nietzsche zur Einfuhrung (2011), p. 27, for the Nietzsche-Wagner gift. Flagged for replacement. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Meisterstiche.' Tertiary source on Panofsky's and Lippmann's readings of the three prints as a group. Flagged for replacement with Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (1943, rev. 1955). - [14] Lutheran Reformation, 'Albrecht Durer's Knight, Death, and the Devil.' Cites William Martin Conway, ed. and trans., The Writings of Albrecht Durer (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), p. 78, for the 'Der Reuter' title. - [15] LCMS Resources, 'Knight, Death, and the Devil: Albrecht Durer's Mystery Man.' Same author/content family as source 14; corroborating. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Portrait of the Artist's Mother at the Age of 63,' for Barbara Durer's illness, death and Durer's own memorial-book quotation. - [17] Angela Campbell, 'Meticulous Matrices: Building a Chronology of Albrecht Durer's Meisterstiche Impressions through the Analysis and Documentation of Microscopic Scratches in His Engraved Plates,' in Reassessing Epistemic Images in the Early Modern World, ed. Ruth Noyes (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). - [18] Artsy, object listing citing the Bartsch, Meder/Hollstein and Schoch-Mende-Scherbaum catalogue numbers for this print. - [19] Albrecht Durer, Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands, 1520-1521 (translated edition), entries recording the sale and trade of prints including 'one Knight,' November and December 1520. Accessed via secondary synthesis rather than a direct fetch of the translated text; flagged for verification against the Conway or Goris and Marlier edition directly. - [20] Encyclopedia.com, biographical entry on Albrecht Durer, for the Italian journeys, the 1495 Nuremberg workshop and the 1512 Maximilian I commissions. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography such as Jane Campbell Hutchison's Albrecht Durer: A Biography. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.