Virgin on a Crescent with a Starry Crown (1500s): Art, History and Details

Virgin on a Crescent with a Starry Crown (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Albrecht Dürer’s many small engravings of the Virgin Mary were extremely popular with a rising middle-class public in search of small devotional works for personal use. Thus, his small compositions depicting the Virgin were frequently copied. Although a mirror image, this print is otherwise a very accurate copy of Dürer’s Virgin with a Starry Crown. A reversed copy means that the copyist attached one of Dürer’s original engravings to a plate and then engraved over the lines, destroying the print in the process.

Object facts

• Title: Virgin on a Crescent with a Starry Crown
• Date: 1500s
• Creator attribution: Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1924.819

Collection credit

Gift of FitzRoy Carrington

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.