Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Two ghoulish roadside specters trail a mysterious knight-rider making his way on horseback along a precarious cliff. Dürer referred to this print as his “rider,” affording
no further clues to his possible identity. The title Knight, Death, and the Devil has origins
among early German collectors. They believed the engraving to depict a Nuremberg legend according to which a lost watchman once encountered death and the devil in the woods. Ever since, the rider’s identity has frequently been recast to suit a variety of socially and politically charged agendas. For some, he represents a Christian soldier stoic in the face of adversity, for others a kind of robber-knight or Robin Hood figure. During the Third Reich, the knight’s image was also troublesomely appropriated as a nationalist icon.