Bodkin Prints - Product details

Nemesis (or The Large Fortune)

Engraving c.1501-2

Size of original 329 x 224 mm, 12 15/16 x 8 13/16 inches

Dürer was already internationally recognised as the greatest artist of Northern Europe of his time when he produced this spectacular and influential image at the age of about thirty.

Nemesis, the Greek Goddess of retribution, hovers massively over a panoramic Alpine landscape rendered with superb detail. The disparity in scale between the two elements, and the combination of the dignity and composure of the naked goddess with her precarious stance on a globe and her light grip on the heavy metal cup she holds gives an unsettling air to the composition.

Together with his St Eustace of the same period Nemesis marks a new level of sophistication in composition and skill in technique in Dürer’s engraving, and it has remained one of his most celebrated images ever since.

Dürer took attributes of Nemesis from a Latin poem by the Italian humanist Angelo Poliziano (Manto, published in Venice 1498), who described the winged goddess "aloft, floating in empty air" through clouds, carrying a bridle to restrain wrongdoers and a bowl. This last has usually been taken by critics to represent rewards for the deserving.

For the ancient Greeks, Nemesis was purely a goddess of punishment for the evil or the over-ambitious but, following some Latin sources, Poliziano combined Nemesis with Fortuna who both rewards and punishes. He also associated his Nemesis with the transmission of classical knowledge.

Dürer added the globe which had been an alternative attribute to Fortuna's wheel since classical times. A winged woman either standing on or holding a globe also gives us the Roman figure of Victory, often shown on Roman coins and monuments.

This has been linked to Dürer's great friend Willibald Pirckheimer, who commanded the Nuremburg contingent of Imperial troops in the not very victorious Swabian War against the Swiss in 1499. On his return home he was presented with a gold cup by the city. Pirckheimer was a notable humanist whose library and collection may have provided Dürer's sources, and who would have appreciated the complexities of the image.

The print is still sometimes referred to by Bartsch's title of "The Great Fortune" (to distinguish it from a smaller Dürer engraving of the same subject) but Dürer's journal of his trip to the Netherlands in 1520-21 uses the title Nemesis.

The landscape is an accurate if simplified view of the town and surroundings of Chiusa (Klausen in German) in the Alto Adige, now in Italy, seen from the mountain opposite the town. Many of the larger buildings still survive, including the fortified monastery of Sabiona at the top of the crag to the right with Branzoll castle lower down.

Dürer stayed here on his way to Italy in 1494 and probably made a watercolour study which has not survived. He may have chosen to include the view in a print after seeing the huge and magnificent aerial view of Venice in woodcut of Jacobo de'Barbari (1500), who came to live in Nuremburg in 1500.

With an Apollo and Diana of similar date, Nemesis is the first German print to take a classical deity as subject. Dürer had been putting his famous AD monogram on all his prints for some years, but did not begin to date his prints until 1503.

A preparatory drawing of the goddess and a wing survives in the British Museum. This has a grid of impressed lines upon which the figure was constructed according to the proportional system of Vitruvius, who we know Dürer had read being introduced to the subject by de'Barbari. This is the first print of Dürer to use a proportional system.

Click image to enlarge

Size of reproduction:
329 x 224 mm, 12 15/16 x 8 13/16 inches

Print price:
£45 €65 $73

£ and € print prices include UK VAT at 17.5%. No UK VAT on Books.