Winged Man In Idealistic Clothing, playing a Lute 1497

Albrecht Durer created this drawing of a Winged Man in Idealistic Clothing, playing a Lute around 1497. The image presents us with an angel, an archetypal figure, one that Durer would have known from the traditional art he saw around him in Germany at that time. However, what’s interesting here is the way that Durer has combined this figure of traditional religious art with a very human, earthly, almost fashionable character, playing a lute. What does it mean to make an angel seem so tangible, so real? We know that Durer was interested in humanist ideas that were coming from Italy at that time. So, this combination of the divine and the everyday perhaps speaks of a changing world, a world in which the institutions of religion and the ideas of humanism are in dialogue. To understand more, look at the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, and the wider history of Humanism in Northern Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century.