A whole world can be compressed in the smallest of spaces.
Albrecht Dürer's copperplate engraving “The Great Horse”, measuring only 16.7 by 11.7 centimeters, is such a case.
Created in 1505 after years of study of proportions, Dürer's entire cosmos and the conviction of being able to “tear the quintessence of a being from nature”, i.e. draw parallel to nature (which “tear” meant at the time).
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the features section.
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But even more so, there is a world tour through space and time in this small-format copper engraving, from Bremen via Brandenburg to Uzbekistan and Canada and now back again. Together with fifty paintings, almost two thousand drawings and several thousand pieces of prints from the Kunsthalle Bremen, Dürer's “Great Horse” was relocated to Schloss Karnzow in Brandenburg in 1943. Shortly after the end of the war, the hiding place in Karnzow was discovered and looted. A soldier from Uzbekistan took the engraving with him from the Soviet soldiers waiting there for their journey home and apparently gave it to others in his home country. A descendant of those who received the gift at the time now lives in Canada. He discovered the Kunsthallen stamp on the back and informed the Bremer Kunstverein to return the sheet.
Now one will ask whether such a fuss about a single sheet is justified. In fact, only twenty-five copies of Dürer's copperplate are known in public collections worldwide, with a print run of around two to five hundred sheets at the time. The art-historical importance of the engraving, which was exceptionally well preserved despite the trip around the world, cannot be overestimated, as artists from Baldung Grien to Caravaggio Dürer's horse have quoted. Not surprisingly: it is the art of puzzles par excellence.
Because the brightly lit horse stands in front of dark, looming ruin silhouettes; its nostrils overlap a towering column, on the plinth of which only the feet of a statue can be seen, which appears antique in its stationary motif. The massive horse looks like a warhorse, but unlike Dürer's masterpiece “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” nobody rides it and it is unsaddled. Rather, a magnificently helmeted warrior with a halberd stands behind the horse, which visually grows out of the horse's body as a second head and, through this fusion, increases the number of hoof legs to four, making the horse a centaur or a chimera. The halberdier could also be meant as a "Roman" in view of his fantasy armor and the probably ancient ruins and figure column by Dürer.