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ABSTRACT Among Albrecht Dürer's first known woodcuts is one showing a syphilitic man. The Nuremberg artist's image is the earliest known depiction of an individual suffering from this illness. Syphilis was probably brought by Conquistadores from the New World to Naples in the later 1490s and was then transmitted throughout Western Europe by Northern mercenaries (Landsknechten) returning from Italy to their native Germany and Switzerland. The attire worn by Dürer's Syphilitic Man is exactly that of the Landsknecht. This makes the image important not only as a very early work by the artist and the earliest image of a syphilitic, but also as a depiction of the agent of the disease. The young Dürer had ample opportunity to study such mercenaries during his journeyman years in present-day Switzerland and Strasbourg, since most of them came from precisely the same impoverished territories.
THAT ONE OF ALBRECHT DÜRER'S very first independent woodcuts should remain almost unknown is less surprising than it might seem. Ignorance of his Syphilitic Man, reproduced in Figure 1 without the enframing Latin text, is partly due to the small number of surviving impressions.The print's first state, dated June 1, 1496, on the enframing text, survives in only three examples, in the major print rooms of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.All of these are hand-colored and were published by the Nuremberg printer Hans Mair.
Without Dürer's monogram, the Syphilitic Man remained in obscurity until 1856, when it was first ascribed to Dürer by Cornill d'Orville.Art historians ignored that discovery and attribution until the woodcut reemerged almost half a century later and was given the same ascription by J.Ueltzen (1900).A third rediscovery was made by the pioneering German syphilologist Karl Sudhoff (1912a, 1912b),who was unaware of the preceding publications.Aby M. Warburg (1920), who saw Sudhoff 's reproduction, was among the first art historians to accept the crudely cut Syphilitic Man as of Dürer's initial design. In 1928, Dürer scholar Eduard Flechsig followed Warburg in this belief. Though accepted as autograph by many other distinguished specialists, including Erwin Panofsky (1995), and placed in the corpus of the artist's woodcuts prepared byWalter L. Strauss (1980), it was not until the canonical and suitably splendid cinquecentenary 1471 Albrecht Dürer 1971 exhibition in Nuremberg's Germanisches Nationalmuseum that the modest,...