Erasmus of Rotterdam (1526): Artwork and History

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1526) 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 idolized the learned Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, famously noting in his diary that Erasmus should take over for the Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther, whom Dürer feared had been killed. The artist and the scholar met three times in the Netherlands in 1520–21, and Dürer gave Erasmus several prints and drew his portrait. Erasmus also praised the artist, observing that, like artists of antiquity, “What cannot Dürer express in monochromes, that is, by black lines only?” Fittingly, Dürer’s expansive monochrome engraving includes Latin and Greek captions complimenting Erasmus’s scholarship, with his hefty tomes piled along its lower edge.

Object facts

• Title: Erasmus of Rotterdam
• Date: 1526
• Artist attribution: Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: Image/plate: 25.1 × 19.3 cm (9 15/16 × 7 5/8 in.); Sheet: 25.8 × 19.7 cm (10 3/16 × 7 13/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.957

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

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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.