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Your galleryTerminus, the Device of Erasmus
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Find the Latin words on either side of the head and on the post below, then compare the sharp profile with the soft gold disc behind it.
The Dutch scholar Erasmus took as his emblem Terminus, the Roman god who guarded boundaries and would not give up his place on the Capitoline Hill even to Jupiter. Holbein gives the god Erasmus’s own profile, set on a stone post rising from the earth, beside the Latin “concedo nulli,” I give way to no one. Tree-ring study of the panel helped date it to about 1532.
oil on wood · Framed: 32.4 x 32.4 x 4.5 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Northern Renaissance
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Terminus, the Device of Erasmus
- Artist
- Hans Holbein the Younger (German, active England and Switzerland, 1497/98–1543)
- Date
- c. 1532
- Medium
- oil on wood
- Dimensions
- Framed: 32.4 x 32.4 x 4.5 cm (12 3/4 x 12 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 21.6 x 21.6 cm (8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Sherman E. Lee in memory of Milton S. Fox
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Artist’s life 1497–1543
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.