Albrecht Dürer, printmaker

Early in his career, Albrecht Dürer grappled with the rigidity of engraving and depicted nude bodies with some hesitation. For instance, the poor reconciliation of shading within the left-hand figure’s shape indicates that he may have begun the figure with a complete, single outline and thereafter shaded the form with hatching. As he quickly became proficient in the medium, Dürer worked in sections, modeling each section entirely before drawing a complete outline.

Dürer’s depiction of four nude females and a grotesque devil exploits the late-15th-century interest in the Greek goddess Hecate, patroness of evil magic and transformations and goddess of crossroads. Hecate was often represented with three faces or bodies, probably to suggest that she could look in all directions at doorways or crossings. An underworld goddess, her counterpart on earth was Diana. Some scholars have therefore interpreted Dürer’s four female figures as Diana, her backside facing the viewer, surrounded by the three forms of Hecate, her alter ego. Such complex allusions corresponded with the revival of classical languages and literature by humanists such as Willibald Pirkheimer in Dürer’s native Nuremberg.