Knight, Death, and the Devil

An armoured knight rides through a ravine on a tall horse, looking straight ahead. At his left, on a thin pale horse, Death rides alongside, crowned, with snakes in his hair, holding up an hourglass; behind him walks a devil with a pig's snout, a goat's horn and a pike. A dog runs under the horse, a lizard scuttles the other way, a skull lies on a stump at the lower left beside a tablet with the date 1513 and Dürer's monogram, and above the trees a castle stands on a hill in the light. Conway, whose account of 1889 the archive holds, reads it as a companion to Melencolia I: the sanguine temperament to her melancholic, the man of action to her thinker, the two together meant, in his words, ‘to shadow forth the religious and intellectual spirits of the day’.

Conway's sentence for the central action is a Victorian's: ‘Death turns round at the Knight, holding up the hour-glass to his view, not in malice, not in wrath, but in sad and solemn warning.’ It is gentler than the print; but it catches the thing that makes the engraving unlike a Dance of Death. Death here does not seize anyone. He rides along and shows the time. The verse Conway quotes at the figure is the pale horse of the Apocalypse: ‘and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and hell followed him’. On the plate, hell is the devil walking behind. The skull among the roots at the bottom is the argument's footnote, set on the stone where the artist signed his name.

The knight's horse is the point of the picture's pride. Dürer had drawn this animal before, in a Saint George of 1508, and Conway says the knight of the later print is ‘identically the same warrior on the same horse, but in a different position’; he had studied the proportions of horses for years and this is the result, a war-horse with its neck arched and every muscle placed. Death's horse is its opposite, thin, stumbling, head down, the kind of horse a poor man rides. Two horses, two conditions of life, side by side.

The devil is the least frightening thing in the print and the most grotesque: a pig's snout, a single twisted horn, ass's ears, a pike over the shoulder, trudging behind the horse's tail. Conway calls him ‘the Devil that brings all things to their end’, and puts him in the knight's train with Death: the rider goes ‘accompanied by the Timespirit whom men call Death, and followed by the Devil’. The knight does not look at either. Conway's reading of the knight himself, as Saint George the Reformer riding fearlessly ‘through the dark valley of life’, is the reading of 1889, a Protestant Englishman's, and the archive gives it as his; the print has been read as a Christian soldier, a robber knight and a portrait ever since, and none of those readings is the archive's to settle.

Snakes writhe out of Death's hair and one coils round his throat. Conway does not mention them. The archive records them as seen and notes only that snakes in the hair belong to Medusa and to the Furies, and that Dürer knew his classical monsters.

Death is crowned, a spiked crown with the snakes coming through it. Conway does not say so either. A crowned Death is Death as king, the medieval commonplace, and the reader may take the thought that far; the mark stops where the source stops.

‘The sombre way is bordered by barren banks and overshadowed by gnarled and leafless trees’, Conway writes, and the castle in the light above is the only thing in the picture that is not in shadow. Whether it is the knight's destination or simply the world going on above the ravine, the print does not say. It is one of the three engravings Dürer made in 1513 and 1514 that have been called his master engravings, and this archive holds two of them. The third, Saint Jerome in his study, is a man reading; this one is a man riding; Melencolia is a woman thinking. Conway's pairing of two of the three is one way to read them, and it is given here as his.