The Complete Series of 12 Monumental Woodcuts, Including an Unrecorded First Impression of 1498

Dürer, Albrecht. Passio domini nostri Jesu […] per fratrem Chelidonium collecta. Cum figuris Alberti Dureri Norici Pictoris. Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer, 1511.

The complete series of Albrecht Dürer’s monumental Great Passion, one of the supreme achievements in the history of the woodcut and among the defining masterpieces of the German Renaissance.

The set contains all twelve compositions, including nine sheets from Dürer’s 1511 text edition, with title page and colophon. Three sheets are from other printings: the Ecce Homo (“Presentation of Christ”) is identified by the catalogue as a first impression of 1498; the Carrying of the Cross is from the Augsburg 1675 edition; and Christ in Limbo is in the earliest state after the text edition.

Edition & Physical Description

Complete suite of twelve large-format woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer.

Most sheets from Dürer’s own 1511 text edition, with Latin letterpress text on the versos and the colophon on the final leaf. Three impressions are from other printings: Ecce Homo 1498, Carrying of the Cross 1675, and Christ in Limbo in the earliest state after the text edition.

Large folio, sheet sizes varying slightly up to approximately 394 × 281 mm. Unbound and framed under glass.

Mostly trimmed to the border line; the Arrest trimmed approximately 2–3 mm all round and approximately 5 mm at the right edge; isolated thin areas or tiny losses; one leaf with small breaks in the paper along the watermark line; three leaves with insignificant brown or red spots within the image; the Resurrection with traces of old red-pencil squaring.

Overall, this is a very good copy of the series, which has become rare complete.

Dürer and the Reinvention of the Woodcut

The Great Passion occupied Dürer for more than a decade.

The earliest sheets were produced between 1496 and 1500: Christ on the Mount of Olives, the Flagellation, the Ecce Homo, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Lamentation, and the Entombment. After interruptions caused by Dürer’s Italian journeys and other projects, the series resumed around 1510 with the Last Supper, the Arrest of Christ, Christ in Limbo, and the Resurrection, before finally culminating in the title page of 1511 showing the Man of Sorrows accompanied by a Landsknecht soldier.

The sequence therefore documents Dürer’s own artistic transformation from the late Gothic visual world of the fifteenth century toward the fully developed Renaissance language he absorbed through Italy.

In the later sheets especially, Dürer abandoned the harder contour-driven style of earlier German woodcut illustration in favour of subtle tonal modelling through dense parallel hatching and carefully orchestrated contrasts of light and shadow. Contemporary scholarship has rightly described the series as an absolute high point in the history of the woodcut.

The Visionary Passion

The series is remarkable not only technically but psychologically.

Dürer does not merely illustrate isolated biblical episodes. He compresses multiple moments into unified visionary compositions charged with emotional and spiritual intensity. In the Arrest of Christ, for example, the kiss of Judas, the seizure of Christ, Peter’s attack on Malchus, and the fleeing disciple all unfold simultaneously within a single charged composition.

Likewise the Resurrection merges elements of Christ’s rising with aspects of the Ascension itself, creating what Erwin Panofsky famously described as a strange revival of the visionary within the new Renaissance woodcut style.

The emotional immediacy of the cycle reflects the intense devotional culture of late medieval Passion meditation, yet transformed through Dürer’s unprecedented artistic ambition.

The Extraordinary First Impression of 1498

The Ecce Homo sheet in the present set is of exceptional importance.

It belongs to the extremely rare first printing of 1498 rather than the 1511 text edition; the Carrying of the Cross and Christ in Limbo are also from other printings, as specified above. The identification rests on two decisive bibliographical characteristics: the defect at the inner edge of the upper corner pillar and the small missing section in the garment of the youth at lower left.

The impression quality itself confirms the attribution. The print displays the sharp, burr-like richness associated only with the earliest pulls and lacks all the wear and damage characteristic of later impressions after 1570, which are generally described in the literature as weak or flat.

The discovery effectively elevates the entire suite into a new category of rarity and importance.

Provenance

German private collection.

Literature

Wunderkammer, Catalogue 90, vol. I, entry 37, pp. 322, 328.

Meder 113–124; Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum II, nos. 154–165; Sonnabend 51–62; Winkler 1957, 114ff.; Albrecht Dürer no. 597.