The Fourth Knot (c. 1507): Artwork and History

The Fourth Knot (c. 1507) 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:

Around 1506, Albrecht Dürer designed a series of six ornate woodcuts of labyrinthine designs after a set of engravings by the school of Leonardo da Vinci, which he may have seen or acquired during an early trip to Italy. Though Dürer left them unsigned, possibly because he borrowed their source material, he referred in his diary to giving away his series of knots on a trip to the Netherlands, and this title has become standard. These impressions are printed on a thin, nearly translucent Italian paper, which may have influenced scholars to occasionally interpret them as embroidery patterns.

Object facts

• Title: The Fourth Knot
• Date: c. 1507
• Artist attribution: Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Woodcut in black on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: Image: 27 × 21.1 cm (10 11/16 × 8 5/16 in.); Sheet: 28.5 × 22.7 cm (11 1/4 × 8 15/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1929.316

Collection credit

Clarence Buckingham Collection

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.