Click image for slideshow!

Though Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528) and Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch, 1601–1669) created their artwork a century apart, connections between their prints are significant, intriguing, and often remarkable. The Inspired Line: Selected Prints of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn from the Thrivent Financial Collection of Religious Art provides an opportunity to view their religious works side by side and consider the historical contexts, religious backgrounds, and aesthetic approaches of these two great masters.

At a young age, Dürer was trained as a metalworker by his father in Nuremberg, Germany. Later, Dürer applied the same exacting methods to his woodcuts and engravings. His strong admiration for Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance led him to become the father of the Northern European Renaissance. Though Dürer was Catholic, he was encouraged by an enthusiastic patron to befriend chief figures of the Protestant Reformation, an act that involved him in religious controversy until his death.

Rembrandt, who began his career as a scholar, imbued his portraits with psychological depth and masterly light and shadow. At the height of his career, he was the most successful artist of the Baroque Era in Holland, a time of extraordinary prosperity. A lifelong member of the Dutch Reformed Church in a predominately Protestant country, Rembrandt received no church commissions; rather, his patronage came from the thriving middle class. He was a highly accomplished etcher who created unique, profound interpretations of biblical stories.

Both artists rendered multiple scenes of Jesus’s life and other New Testament stories, and prints of these biblical themes are especially strong in this collection. The exhibition includes several pairs of works in which Dürer and Rembrandt each executed his own version of the same subject matter, including The Death of the Virgin, The Circumcision, St. Jerome, and The Crucifixion.

For example, in Dürer’s 1510 woodcut print of The Death of the Virgin, one of the 19 prints in his “Life of the Virgin” series, Mary is shown reclining in a heavily draped bed placed in the center of the scene. Catholic influences and classical architecture dominate the setting.

Rembrandt, who owned several sets of Dürer’s series, created his own etching of The Death of the Virgin in 1659. While Rembrandt was clearly influenced by Dürer’s composition, his version includes many more undefined, loosely sketched spaces, evoking instead an atmospheric drama that portends the Virgin’s ascension. Viewed together, the two works—each a masterful, well-known print—illustrate the differences in aesthetic movements and religious influences of their times, yet by sharing a subject matter, they are ideal counterpoint images.

The exhibition, which includes 23 prints by Dürer and 17 by Rembrandt, addresses the extraordinary nature and output of each artist’s respective print oeuvres and explores the practical and aesthetic differences between each artist’s preferred medium. The actual processes involved in the medium of printmaking will also be incorporated into the labels and educational materials. Curator Joanna Reiling Lindell is Curator for the Collection of Religious Art at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans in Minneapolis.