Before his conversion to Christianity, Saint Eustace was a Roman general named Placidus. One day while hunting, he tracked a white stag that climbed onto a high rock. Looking up at the beast, Placidus saw an image of the crucified Christ between the animal’s horns. Placidus decided at that moment to convert to Christianity. The next day, Placidus, his wife, and children were baptized and he took the name Eustace.
Albrecht Dürer depicts Eustace in fifteenth-century hunter’s garb. His horse stands nearby and his hunting dogs rest in the foreground. In the background, a German castle and town sit on a hill. Eustace is supposedly drawn in the likeness of Emperor Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor and Dürer’s patron.
In Saint Eustace, Dürer’s largest print, the artist depicts nature realistically, with many carefully observed details. The dog, horse, and deer, as well as the foliage, water, stone, and pebbles, are meticulously presented so that the print becomes a tapestry of nature studies. The attention to perspective is a reminder of Dürer’s studies of Italian Renaissance art, while the detailed landscape background recalls 15th century Flemish paintings. Dürer explores a range of tones possible within the medium of engraving and creates atmospheric perspective by contrasting darker lines in the foreground with lighter areas that depict the distant objects. For additional information about the Renaissance use of perspective, see the Lesson Plan for The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Engraving evolved in the fifteenth century from the metalsmith’s technique of carving designs on metal. The image is cut into a copper plate with a burin, a sharp tool with a v-shaped edge. Lines can be made thinner or thicker by tilting the burin while incising the line. Once the image is completed, the plate is inked, then wiped with a cloth to remove ink from the surface and push ink into the engraved grooves. When the plate and dampened paper are run between the two rollers of a printing press, the pressure forces the remaining ink out of the grooves of the plate and onto the paper.
Albrecht Dürer, one of the first geniuses of printmaking, learned engraving in his father’s goldsmith studio. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a painter and designer of woodcuts. After learning the artistic traditions of Germany and Flanders (modern Belgium), Dürer visited Venice in 1494-95 and again in 1505-7, gaining first-hand knowledge of Italian Renaissance art. Dürer devoted much of the rest of his career to creating monumental and natural figures moving within a convincing three-dimensional space. He spent the last years of his life editing his writings on art. His book on proportion was published the year after his death.
