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 present set contains all twelve large-format woodcuts with title page, Latin text on the versos, and the colophon leaf from Dürer’s own 1511 edition, with one extraordinary exception: the Ecce Homo (“Presentation of Christ”) survives here not in the later 1511 state, but in the exceedingly rare first impression of 1498, previously known in only two recorded examples.
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 derive from different early printings, including the sensational first impression of the Ecce Homo woodcut from 1498.
Large folio, sheet sizes varying slightly up to approximately 394 × 281 mm. Unbound and framed under glass. The impressions are generally trimmed close to the borderline, as commonly encountered, but remain remarkably fresh and visually powerful throughout.
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.
Unlike the other impressions, it belongs not to the 1511 text edition but to the extremely rare first printing of 1498. 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
Meder 113–124; Schoch/Mende/Scherbaum II, nos. 154–165; Sonnabend 51–62; Winkler 1957, 114ff.; Albrecht Dürer no. 597.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 37:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
