Four Naked Women

Four women stand so close together that their bodies almost fill the room. Two turn their backs towards us, while the other two look out from the opposite side of the group. Above their heads hangs a ball inscribed with the date 1497 and the letters O.G.H. Below them lie a skull and a bone; at the left, a devil peers through flames. These details make Albrecht Dürer's Four Naked Women unsettling before we have decided what the women are doing. The small engraving survives in several collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose impression measures 19 × 12.7 centimetres. ^[1]

The alternative title The Four Witches supplies a story that the more descriptive title leaves open. Both names remain in use. Even the National Galleries of Scotland, which calls its impression The Four Witches , acknowledges that the figures' exact identity is unknown. The date has firmer standing: this is Dürer's first dated engraving, an important point of reference among early prints whose chronology is less secure. ^[2]

A gathering without an obvious action

The central woman presents the broadest uninterrupted view of a back. Her hair is gathered up, with a leafy wreath around it and a single long curl descending towards her shoulder blades. The woman beside her, at the far left, also faces away but turns her head into profile. Her tall, folded headdress introduces a different silhouette. On the right, another woman faces us, holding a cloth across her lower body. Between her head and the central woman's is a fourth face, belonging to a figure whose body is largely concealed.

The arrangement invites us to move around the bodies with our eyes. A shoulder turns towards a back, a face appears beyond a nearer head, and a bent arm helps close the group. Yet the enclosure does not produce a clear exchange. No single gesture explains what has just happened or what will happen next. The women stand near enough for intimacy, but their looks do not resolve into an easily followed conversation. Their proximity is certain; their relationship remains elusive.

The room contributes to this uncertainty. The narrow opening at the left contains a grotesque face and rising flames. At the right, a much taller arched opening leads into darkness. A raised strip of floor runs along that side, interrupting what might otherwise have been a simple platform for the figures. Dürer gives the women solid footing while making the surrounding space feel cramped and awkward to navigate. There is scarcely room for another person to join them.

The skull is particularly easy to miss because the pale bodies command attention first. It appears low down between the two figures seen from behind, close to the folds of fallen cloth. The elongated bone lies farther right. Looking down from the living bodies towards these remains changes the scene's emotional temperature. Flesh and bone occupy the same small enclosure. The devil adds another kind of threat, but the women do not respond with the alarm that a modern viewer might expect.

Dürer's AD monogram occupies a clear patch of floor beneath the central figure. Above her, the hanging ball is divided into curved compartments, with the date and initials set into separate bands. The design thus carries a conspicuous signature and year, while offering only abbreviated words to explain the gathering. Its maker is much easier to identify than its subject.

How black lines make flesh

The apparent softness of these bodies depends on a demanding metalworking process. In copperplate engraving, a burin cuts lines into the plate. Ink enters those incisions, the surface is wiped, and damp paper receives the image under pressure. The dark marks on the finished sheet therefore register grooves cut into metal. The Pushkin Museum's account of the process explains how repeated strokes can build light, shadow and tone. ^[13]

In Four Naked Women , those strokes change direction and density as they cross the figures. On the central woman's back, relatively open areas of paper give way to denser hatching at the sides. Shorter marks gather around the waist and beneath the buttocks, while the legs are modelled through longer sequences. The transition from pale paper to closely spaced lines lets a rounded body emerge without a painted flesh colour. The surrounding wall carries a much more continuous web of strokes, setting the figures against a comparatively dark field.

Hair, cloth and skin also demand different kinds of attention. The loose curl on the central back reads as a narrow, wandering line over a much larger expanse of flesh. The headdresses are built from folds and overlapping edges. Across the right-hand woman's hips, the cloth collects into a series of loops and creases. These small changes keep the four figures distinct even where their silhouettes overlap. The image offers both an ensemble and a set of separate studies in turning, standing and covering.

When the women became witches

The witch interpretation has a long history, but it is a history of looking and argument. In his Teutsche Academie of 1675, Joachim von Sandrart described the engraving and explicitly preferred witches to the Three Graces. His reasons were the skull, bones, hell and devil shown alongside the women. He also recorded that some people expanded O.G.H. as O Gott hüte , asking God to protect them from witchcraft. His wording distinguishes his own judgement about the figures from an explanation of the initials circulating among others. ^[14]

That passage helps explain why the later title became persuasive. Sandrart joined several disturbing accessories into one account of the gathering. It also shows how much interpretation the title contains. He was writing 178 years after the date on the print, and he presented an argument from its imagery. The title does not function like an identifying inscription supplied by Dürer.

The letters above the women still resist a definitive expansion. German History in Documents and Images follows the protective-prayer reading, whereas the National Galleries of Scotland says that O.G.H. has defied explanation. The three initials are visible and securely part of the design; their intended words are another matter. The ball's prominent position encourages us to treat it as a key, but Dürer has given us less than a complete sentence. A confident solution can make the entire scene seem settled sooner than the evidence warrants. ^{[15] [2]}

The witch reading nonetheless remains useful. It connects the devil, human remains and enclosed gathering, and it makes the women's calmness more troubling. Scotland's museum proposes that three witches may be initiating a fourth woman, while preserving that proposal as a possibility. The print itself does not label an initiate or show an unmistakable ceremonial action. Its threatening atmosphere is easier to establish than a precise ritual. ^[2]

Classical bodies and competing stories

The figures' various turns have also encouraged comparisons with classical groups. Dana Cowen, writing for the Cleveland Museum of Art, places the print among Dürer's enigmatic explorations of mythological and allegorical subjects. She identifies Venus with the Graces and the four seasons among its proposed subjects, while emphasising how the devil and bones pull the image towards witchcraft. Her account interprets the combination of nudity and cryptic imagery as material for thought and conversation in a humanist setting. ^[16]

Other museums give the classical possibility a more specific narrative. The Pushkin Museum suggests that the largely hidden woman could be Eris, goddess of discord, with Venus, Minerva and Juno in the foreground. It connects this interpretation with the Judgement of Paris and a warning against luxury. Berthold Hinz's essay for the ALBERTINA objects that Paris himself is absent and that the scene does not fit the relevant contemporary iconography. Hinz instead proposes that Dürer brought together separately developed studies of female bodies within an ominous setting that made their publication possible. ^{[17] [18]}

These readings ask different things of the same arrangement. A classical identification seeks a story behind the four figures. Hinz's interpretation gives their bodily differences and separate poses a larger role in explaining the composition. Reading them as the seasons makes their number significant, although the image supplies none of the plainly seasonal work or landscape that would make that identification immediate. The differences matter because each proposed narrative changes how we understand the women's relationship to one another.

The witches' relationship to contemporary belief also requires care. Art historian Margaret A. Sullivan argues against treating Dürer's and Hans Baldung Grien's witch images as direct reactions to trials or to demonological writing such as the Malleus maleficarum . She proposes humanist interest in classical poetry and satire as a more persuasive setting for these artistic inventions. This opens a valuable distinction between an imagined gathering and a record of an actual practice. The engraving gives vivid form to menace; its imagery alone cannot establish a particular trial, accusation or event behind it. ^[19]

A print that travelled, and sheets that changed

The design attracted other engravers soon after it appeared. René Schober, curator of the Vienna Academy's print collection, describes Israhel van Meckenem's close, reversed copy. Dürer's engraving dates from 1497, and Meckenem died in 1503, placing the copy within a short interval. Meckenem signed it with his own name instead of reproducing Dürer's AD. Schober interprets the copy as evidence of rapid circulation and a market that made repeating the younger artist's composition worthwhile. ^[20]

That response broadens the print's early history. Its visual arrangement could travel through another artist's plate, even while its narrative remained open to interpretation. An image did not need a securely agreed title to be memorable, recognisable or commercially attractive. The distinctive cluster of bodies was itself something another engraver could carry into circulation.

Individual impressions acquired further histories through handling and collecting. In his 1897 Grolier Club catalogue, S. R. Koehler described one exhibited impression whose original outline had been trimmed away. A false margin had been added and the outline redrawn in ink. He explained how comparison with another impression exposed the alteration. His entry also distinguished ink and paper tones, and listed copies by Wenzel von Olmütz and Meckenem alongside impressions of Dürer's engraving. ^[21]

Koehler's account makes a useful distinction between the composition and a particular surviving sheet. The date and monogram belong to the engraved design; a repaired margin belongs to the subsequent life of an impression. The restoration he described cannot be assigned to every example. Equally, the measurements and Henry Walters gift credit recorded by the Met identify its own sheet, acquired in 1917. A familiar image reproduced in books or on a screen represents one encounter with an object that may have its own paper, edges and collecting history. ^[1]

Later viewers have also disagreed about the bodies themselves. Koehler admired their modelling but interpreted the bones and devil as moralising additions to studies of the nude. He suggested a warning about female beauty, death and sin, an explanation that reveals his own assumptions about how such imagery became acceptable. Frederick Wedmore's Fine Prints of 1905 found the composition unsatisfactory and objected to its particular realism, even while acknowledging its interest. Such judgements reveal changing expectations of the nude as well as changing explanations of the subject. Dürer's figures can appear weighty, vulnerable, self-contained or disquieting according to the viewer's priorities. He makes their presence tangible while leaving the purpose of their gathering unresolved. ^{[21] [22]}