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Mowbray Arch Selection

 

Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528) The Last Supper from The Large Passion, twelve woodcuts, 1497-1511 Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society 2004

On December 7, 2004, at its 30th Annual Art Selection Dinner, the Mowbray Arch Society voted to purchase for the Museum’s collection The Large Passion woodcut series by the preeminent German Renaissance printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528).

One of the most celebrated monuments of Northern Renaissance art, Dürer’s 12 woodcuts present a masterful and richly detailed recounting of Christ’s Passion, beginning with depictions of the Last Supper and Christ Carrying the Cross and concluding with the Descent into Limbo and the Resurrection. Dürer began work on the series in 1497, producing seven of the 12 sheets in the next two years. These early images show a distinctive blend of late Gothic ornamental embellishment and Renaissance illusionism. It was not until 1510, after his second visit to Italy, that Dürer returned to the series and completed the final five sheets.

The Museum’s series is not only in remarkably fine condition, but it gives every indication, particularly in the variation of its watermarks, of being an intact, original set – that is, one that was manufactured, published and sold as a set by Dürer himself and that has remained together and unbroken since then. Such sets, in such an exceptional state of preservation, are extraordinarily rare.

This exquisite series is now on view in the Chrysler’s 16th-century Northern European gallery.

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