The Great Horse; engraving by Albrecht Dürer

Engraving depicting a horse shown from a steeply foreshortened angle, facing to the left, its hind quarters closest to the picture plane. It stands with its rear legs slightly raised on a narrow ledge of earth. The foreshortened pose emphasizes the muscularity of the horse's body. Its tail is knotted and its mane curls abundantly. Its bridle is held by a warrior who strides forward to the left behind the horse, with only his head and legs visible. He wears a helmet surmounted by ornamental designs of a dolphin and a caterpillar, ornate knee guards and carries a pike held vertically. An uneven wall tufted with vegetation forms the backdrop, with a column at the left edge of the picture with the feet and legs of a status just visible on top. The date 1505 is inscribed in the top centre and the artist's monogram at the bottom right corner in the darkened cavity.

This image and another also dating from 1505, 'The Small Horse', were designed by Dürer as companion prints to show two contrasting postures of the horse with associated allegorical meanings.

Historical significance: 'If ‘The Small Horse’ symbolizes animal sensuality restrained by intellect, then this large animal signifies the ‘victory’ of the intellect. Its immense power, i.e., sensuality, has been brought under control; it has been bridled. The armoured warrior – his knee guards are inexplicably unidentical – is smiling victoriously. He is here a step ahead of the horse, whose tail is now doubly knotted. He has progressed from a simple, roughly hewn old wall to a refined column on which a naked idol is partially visible. Most remarkably, the knight is stepping up onto a higher level, whereas the horse is stepping down from a narrow ledge that is curving around a pit or abyss to the safe, even middle ground. The helmet is surmounted by a dolphin, the most ‘intellectual’ of sea creatures, and a caterpillar, the asexual counterpart of the butterfly.'
(From The Illustrated Bartsch 10 (Commentary): Sixteenth Century German Artists, Albrecht Dürer, ed. Walter L. Strauss, New York, 1980, p.215

'In general, Dürer’s horses symbolize restraint. Roughly contemporary with the engraved Adam and Eve…of 1504, they are natural analogues to Adam. In them art and knowledge control the body and restore man’s status as the measure of things. In his Enchiridion Erasmus wrote that “some have a rebellious body, an unbroken and refractory horse, so to speak; and the result is that even with the harshest bit, spurs, and club, the seating driver has trouble taming its wildness”. Self-mastery, the sovereignty of the "I" over the inner and outer temptations, has its image in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil…Here the self, armoured as the Christian knight of medieval pedigree, controls his powerful mount of classical pedigree as he passes through the difficult, pathless world to salvation.'
(From Koerner, Joseph, 'Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza', in Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy – The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist ed. Guilia Bartrum, London: The British Museum Press, 2002, p.33

'Dating from the same year as ‘The Small Horse’…this engraving is unquestionably meant as its counterpart. In its monumentality the horse takes up almost the entire picture area. It is severely foreshortened to about half of its actual length, and it was not proportionately constructed on a grid. There is some resemblance to a horse by Pisanello in the Codex Vallardi, and to a drawing in Jacopo Bellini’s sketchbook.'
(From The Illustrated Bartsch 10 (Commentary): Sixteenth Century German Artists, Albrecht Dürer by Walter L Strauss, New York: Abaris Books, 1980, p.215)

The horse appears as a subject in a number of Dürer’s engravings, often as a focus for depicting movement and proportion, or in a moral or spiritual sense as an emblem of man’s control over himself and the world. In The Large Horse and its companion print from the same year, The Small Horse, it has been suggested that the relationship between both animals and their human masters represents man’s attempt to control sensuality by intellect. Whereas it seems as though the lively, unbridled beast in The Small Horse would like to escape, The Large Horse is a portrait of a docile, muscular animal standing patiently with its master. Unlike the classicism and idealism of The Small Horse, it is also a study in naturalism, as the artist has used great technical precision to render the details of sinew in the animal’s legs, the texture of its coat, the musculature of the head, and finely curled hairs of its mane and tail.

E.652-1940