Coat of Arms with Lion and Rooster (c. 1503): Artwork and History

Coat of Arms with Lion and Rooster (c. 1503) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Albrecht Dürer’s imaginary coat of arms is one of the Art Institute’s finest impressions, with a great delicacy of line and range of tonal values and textures. Though he produced a number of literal portraits as well as abstract family crests, Dürer’s over-the-top treatment of the flowing drapery, and the seemingly living symbols—crowing rooster, and lion rampant— on the crest and shield suggest the artist enjoyed taking a stale iconographic convention to its extremes.

Object facts

• Title: Coat of Arms with Lion and Rooster
• Date: c. 1503
• Artist attribution: Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: Image/sheet, trimmed within platemark: 18.2 × 11.8 cm (7 3/16 × 4 11/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.938

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.