Saint Eustace, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1501

Dürer's largest and most ambitious engraving shows St. Eustace dressed in the costume of a 15th century hunter, equipped with weapons and a powder horn hanging from an elaborately decorated sash slung across his body. The saint's horse and his team of dogs, each of them drawn with an impressive understanding of animal anatomy, wait patiently as he kneels before a stag, which stands on a patch of higher ground surrounded by trees. St. Eustace lifts his hands in prayer at the sight of a crucifix rising between the stag's antlers. There is no historical evidence that St. Eustace ever really existed, but medieval legends relate that he was a Roman soldier serving in the army of the Emperor Trajan, who, on two consecutive days of hunting, had mystical encounters with a stag that spoke to him in the voice of God, urging him to renounce his paganism and become a Christian. Like Job in the Hebrew scriptures, Eustace's faith was subjected to severe trials. He lost his worldly possessions, his status and his family, but he bore all of these deprivations with patience and resignation and, like Job, in the end they were returned to him. Dürer took Eustace's legend out of its Roman context and reimagined it for audiences in the 15th and early 16th centuries. The print is almost unimaginably detailed. Everything, from the texture of the dog's coat in the foreground to the swans floating on the lake, their bodies reflected beneath them on the water, and the impressive mountainous landscape rising in the distance, has been recorded with the same precision. The artist has engraved an astonishing variety of lines and flicked marks into the surface of the copper plate. Strong, definite grooves define the contours of the saint's body, while finer, shallower lines suggest the sinuous rhythms of muscle and bone beneath the animal's skin, and the delicate forms of flowers and grasses that appear beneath their feet. This combination of precision and sensitivity had very little, if any, precedent in engraving before Dürer.