Torture of the ten thousand Christians

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Torture of the Ten Thousand Christians (Albrecht Dürer)
Torture of the ten thousand Christians
Albrecht Dürer , 1508
Oil on wood, transferred to canvas
99 × 87 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie 835

The Torture of Ten Thousand Christians is a painting by the painter Albrecht Dürer from 1508 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

description

At first the picture gives the impression of a hidden object with a jumble of naked and clothed figures. The landscape with gnarled tree shapes and jungle-like vegetation is also unusual for Dürer.

It shows the martyrdom of ten thousand soldiers who, according to legend , were tortured and executed by the ten thousand martyrs around the year 120. The martyrs are beheaded and crucified, their bones broken with a mallet. A column of people is driven up onto a rock and from there plunged into the abyss. In the middle distance the executioners approach a bishop, while a distinguished follower gives instructions to the magnificently equipped rider.

The two figures are in the center of the picture, except from the gruesome happenings around them. Here Dürer is accompanied by an older man whose identity has not been clearly established. It is said to be about the humanist and poet Conrad Celtis , who died in 1508 and appears here as a witness of faith.

The two are from another time and contemplate what is happening. The painting is signed and dated on a cartellino that Dürer is holding on a stick: Iste faciebat an (n) o domini 1508 albert (us) dürer aleman (us) , he also bears Dürer's monogram.

comment

Dürer and Conrad Celtis

The historical background is the common struggle of Prince Achatius of Armenia with his 9,000 men with the army of Emperor Hadrian against insurgents. Achatius converted to the Christian faith with his soldiers because of a light appearance. Then they defeated the insurgents without Hadrian.

When Hadrian learned of the mass conversion to Christianity, he allied himself with barbarian princes and captured the weakened army of Achatius. Impressed by the fact that the new Christians did not deny their religion despite torture, 1,000 followers of the emperor were also baptized. Allegedly, together with the soldiers of Achatius, they were thrown into thorns, crucified or staked.

The topic cannot be historically verified. Achatius was especially venerated by the participants in the Crusades.

According to other sources, it is a question of the persecution of Christians under the Persian king Sapor II , who executed the archbishop of Seleucia-Ksetiphon with a hundred bishops and many clergy in 343.

This massacre offered Dürer the opportunity to depict unusual contortions. In no other work has he shown such a large number of different body positions. When putting together the scene, Dürer drew on his entire stock of samples. Even if he did not depict 10,000, but only 60 martyrs and several henchmen , it is still one of his paintings with the most figures.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin wrote in 1905 in his book " The Art of Albrecht Dürer ":

“Dürer is regretted that he had to deal with such a material. I fear wrongly. He worked on the picture for a long time and with devotion and thought it was good ... Dürer took the material purely from an artistic point of view: the naked, movement, foreshortening, richness without ambiguity, coping with the large space with confident handling of the perspective reduction. "

In Kindler's painting lexicon it says about this picture:

“This» cabinet and miracle piece «, completed in 1508, is harshly colorful; the cruel accuracy with which all kinds of torture are vividly depicted make the picture difficult for the modern viewer to enjoy. "

history

The " torture of ten thousand Christians " was very rarely depicted in late medieval art. However, Dürer had already depicted the scene described in collections of medieval legends around 1496/97 in the woodcut " Ten Thousand Martyrs ".

The immediate reason for the commission was probably the collection of relics of the Saxon Elector Frederick the Wise in the Wittenberg Castle Church , for which the painting was intended and which also contained alleged relics of the ten thousand soldiers who converted to Christianity, including their leaders Achatius and Ermolaus . Dürer received the order from the Saxon Elector Friedrich in 1507 and was rewarded royally with 280 guilders for this work.

Almost simultaneously with the " Ten Thousand Martyrs ", Dürer received the major order for the so-called Heller Altar for the Frankfurt cloth merchant and mayor Jakob Heller .

A copy of Dürer's Martyrdom of Ten Thousand Christians made by Johann Christian Ruprecht in 1653 is in the possession of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Legend of the Ten Thousand Martyrs in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints. Retrieved January 5, 2018.
  2. ↑ Cf. Christina Posselt: Comment. In: Joachim von Sandrart: Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, Nuremberg 1675–1680, scientifically commented online edition. Thomas Kirchner , Alessandro Nova , Carsten Blüm, Anna Schreurs , Thorsten Wübbena, July 1, 2009, accessed on June 9, 2013 . The person accompanying Dürer was sometimes identified as Willibald Pirckheimer, for example with Joachim von Sandrart (cf. Joachim von Sandrart: Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, Nuremberg 1675–1680, scientifically commented online edition, vol. 1 , 1675, II, book 3, page 224. Scientific commented online edition ed. by Thomas Kirchner, Alessandro Nova, Carsten Blum, Anna Schreurs, Thorsten Wübbena, accessed on June 9, 2013 . ). Albert Gümbel identified him as Degenhart Pfäffinger , Albert Gümbel: The Electorate Chamberlain Degenhart von Pfeffingen, Dürer's companion on the "Martyrdom of ten thousand Christians" (= Studies on German Art History 238). Heitz, Strasbourg 1926.
  3. ↑ Schmied: Harenberg Museum of Painting.
  4. ↑ Kindler's Painting Lexicon , p. 2549.
  5. ^ Martyrdom of the tens of thousands of Christians from Ruprecht to Dürer on the website of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

literature

  • Christoph Stöcker: Dürer, Celtis and the false bishop Achatius. On the iconography of Dürer's "Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand" . In: Artibus et Historiae . tape 5 , no. 9 , 1984, pp. 121-137 , JSTOR : 1483172 .
  • Fedja Anzelewsky : Albrecht Dürer. The painterly work , 2nd revised edition, Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin 1991.
  • Jan Paul Niederkorn: Emperor Rudolf II., A criminal ambassador and Dürer's 'torture of ten thousand Christians' . In: Yearbook of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien 10, 2008, pp. 128–139.
  • Heike Schlie: 'Convincing' in the context of religious knowledge. Testimony networks in Lucas Cranach's Wittenberg Heiltumsbuch and in Dürer's Marter der Ten Thousand . In: About witnesses. Scenarios of testimony and their actors . Fink, Paderborn 2017, ISBN 978-3-7705-5732-5 , pp. 271-304.

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