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Your galleryThe Death of the Virgin
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Follow the candle in Mary’s hands to the faces around the bed, then look down to the tall candlestick and the initials M S at the bottom.
The apostles crowd around Mary’s curtained bed as she dies with a candle in her hands, while one of them reads from a book in the foreground. Schongauer, a goldsmith’s son and the first German printmaker trained as a painter, draws every figure and fold with an unbroken outline and shades them with fine strokes that curve along the forms. His prints carried his influence across Europe.
Engraving in black on ivory laid paper · Sheet, trimmed to platemark: 25.9 × 17 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Late Gothic and Early Renaissance
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Details and source
- Museum title
- The Death of the Virgin
- Artist
- Martin Schongauer German, c. 1430/50-1491
- Date
- c. 1470
- Medium
- Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet, trimmed to platemark: 25.9 × 17 cm (10 1/4 × 6 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.