Nemesis (The Great Fortune)

A woman with enormous wings stands above a valley, carrying a covered cup and a bridle. Her feet rest on a sphere; a long cloth streams out behind her and drops towards the clouds. Below, a river passes between buildings, wooded slopes and exposed rock. Albrecht Dürer gives the airborne figure a clear silhouette, then fills the ground beneath her with so many small incidents that looking becomes an alternation between recognition and discovery.

Nemesis , also called The Great Fortune , is an engraving of about 1501–02. The Rosenwald impression in the National Gallery of Art has a plate measuring 33.5 × 23.3 centimetres, large enough to accommodate an extensive landscape within a sheet held close to the viewer. Its AD monogram appears on a tablet at the lower right. The goddess’s name is not inscribed on the design. ^[1]

Looking from the cup to the clouds

The cup occupies a surprisingly isolated position. It stands upright on the woman’s outstretched hand, surrounded by pale sky. Its narrow stem rises from a broad foot into a rounded bowl and lid, with a little ornament at the summit. The supporting fingers extend beneath the base. Following that small horizontal ledge back towards the body brings the eye along the forearm, through the elbow and up towards the shoulder. A delicate object becomes a point from which to explore the much larger figure.

The other hand closes around a cluster of straps. Some hang almost vertically, while others turn into loops or pass behind the fabric. The bridle’s broad band projects towards the right, making a clear shape among the narrower lines. Near the bottom, a curved length stretches across the space above the sphere. Looking carefully separates these manufactured forms from the cloth that shares their downward movement. Dürer makes their differences readable without separating them into tidy compartments.

Across the torso, curved and crossing strokes deepen beneath the breasts, beside the abdomen and along the hip. Broad areas remain comparatively light. The transition towards the dark side of the thigh is gradual enough to suggest a rounded surface rather than a flat patch. The forward shin has its own narrow band of light; lower down, the toes extend beyond the sphere’s curved outline. Shadows beneath the feet give their contact with the smooth support a particular location.

The wing changes the rhythm of the marks. Long feathers point out towards the left edge, with narrow pale divisions between them. Closer to the shoulder, shorter overlapping forms gather into a dense, scaly covering. Above the woman’s back, another rounded area of plumage rises behind her neck. These different feather groups keep the wing from becoming a single striped fan. Each section joins the next through changes of direction, size and darkness.

The fabric is still more angular. Its farthest end opens into a pointed shape, with a dark fold running through it. From there, an irregular chain of turns leads back towards the waist and down behind the legs. Pale ridges border deep creases. At the lower left, the cloth comes close to the cloud bank, but the two surfaces remain distinct: one makes long folds, while the other curls into rounded, repeated edges. The same ink can suggest a hard rim, supple material and something as ungraspable as cloud.

How the goddess acquired two names

The double title has a history. Anny Claire Haus explains that collectors long understood the engraving as an elaboration of Dürer’s earlier Small Fortune . In 1856 Bernhard Hausmann identified it with the print named Nemesis in the artist’s Netherlandish journal. Haus also recounts Panofsky’s proposed connection with Pomponius Laetus: a victorious virgin deity withdraws above a corrupt world. Such readings suggest divine authority and the checking of human pride, while leaving Fortune’s changeability entangled with Nemesis’s justice. ^[16]

A major literary connection can be followed in Karl Giehlow’s original article of 1902. He printed the opening of Angelo Poliziano’s Latin Manto beside a reproduction of the engraving. In those lines, the goddess travels suspended in empty air, accompanied by cloud and sounding wings. She holds a bridle and a vessel, checks excessive hopes and opposes the proud. The passage ends with reversals and movement: human actions are mixed and regulated by turns, while the goddess is carried this way and that by a whirlwind. ^[17]

This is more than a list of matching objects. Giehlow interpreted the unworked sky as the poem’s empty air and the fluttering cloth as an equivalent for its wind. He even understood the foot’s movement on the sphere through the poem’s overturning of high and low. His reading turns the engraving into an active response to words: space, motion and the handling of a support participate alongside the things held in the hands. He nevertheless noticed a difference, with ornaments replacing the stars described on the goddess’s brow. ^[17]

Giehlow then followed the poem into its account of Greek greatness and subsequent defeat. He entertained a connection with Willibald Pirckheimer’s experience of the Swiss war and suggested that conversation might have prompted Dürer’s alpine setting. That is a proposed route between literature, politics and the picture, rather than a surviving account of the engraving’s commission. The literary parallel is more secure than an exact reconstruction of the conversation that brought it to the artist. ^[17]

The National Gallery of Victoria reads the cup as reward, the bridle as restraint and the sphere as precarious fate. The two hand-held objects give this reading a tangible form. One is a precious vessel offered upright; the other is equipment for directing and checking movement. Their different uses help explain how favour and limitation can belong to the same figure. ^[18]

A drawing and a measured body

The British Museum’s preparatory study, SL,5218.114, is dated about 1502 and uses brown and black ink over stylus underdrawing. The museum connects its incised grid with Vitruvian proportion, records a correction to the buttocks and identifies two alternative wings. The figure faces left; the finished print faces right. Its lightly outlined shoulder wing differs sharply from the densely worked, detached wing beside it. According to the museum, the latter comes closer to the engraved design after a ninety-degree rotation and reversal in printing. This comparison shows bodily construction and substantial compositional revision working together. ^[19]

Elizabeth J. Petcu’s study, published online in 2026, gives that relationship a further interpretation. She connects the figure’s Vitruvian proportions with an irregular distribution of bodily masses and its combination of human and bird forms. Through the Renaissance grotesque, she reads measured construction as coexisting with structural uncertainty and Fortune’s volatility. The question becomes how measurement can produce something that still resists expectations of physical order. This is Petcu’s argument about the work, rather than Dürer’s recorded explanation or a judgement that its body fails a universal standard of beauty. ^[20]

Following the river through the valley

To look below the clouds is to exchange a few large forms for a multitude of small ones. At the bottom centre, roofs crowd together beside the river. Their steep angles meet the lighter horizontal water, where a bridge and posts establish connections across the channel. The buildings face in different directions; dark openings and the spaces between houses stop them merging into one patterned mass. Stacks of timber sit outside the denser settlement on the right. A route curves upwards towards a taller, more isolated building.

The National Museum of Western Art identifies the landscape with the Klausen area of the Eisack Valley and notes that the view is reversed. Klausen is also known as Chiusa, in South Tyrol. The geographical identification gives the scene a real setting without fixing the date of Dürer’s observation. Nor does it require the entire panorama to be treated as an unchanged view recorded at one moment. ^{[21] [18]}

On the left, a road follows a slope above the water before disappearing behind a projection of rock. Trees stand on the flatter ground beyond. The opposing hillside rises much more abruptly, with a dark cliff and small buildings beneath it. These contrasts make the valley readable as terrain: movement follows water and pathways, while steep ground limits where structures can stand. The eye discovers a succession of possible routes instead of receiving a single frontal view of a town.

The viewpoint also allows roofs, bridges and open spaces to be seen from above. An individual building can occupy attention for a moment before the larger river course draws it away. Returning to the woman afterwards produces an abrupt change of scale. Her feet and the sphere cover an area comparable with a substantial portion of the settlement. Yet the cloud edge prevents a continuous passage from her support into the valley’s roads and slopes. Each zone has its own spatial logic.

Near the lower right corner, the AD tablet stands among grass and uneven ground. Its straight sides and strong lettering distinguish it from nearby plants. It is small enough to become another discovery during a search through the foreground, but simple enough to recognise immediately once found. The design takes the viewer from an enormous winged presence to this compact sign of its maker.

Cutting lines and printing a surface

Friedrich Lippmann’s historical handbook explains engraving as a design cut in recessed lines on a copper plate. Its account of the burin describes pressure from the palm driving the tool forwards while the plate is turned to meet the stroke. After inking and wiping, pressure brings dampened paper against the plate and transfers ink from its incisions. The printed black line consequently records a channel made in metal. Its apparent ease on paper depends on resistance, pressure and control at an earlier stage. ^[22]

Look at the cup again with that process in mind. Its closely spaced edges have to stay distinct for the bowl, stem and foot to remain legible. The wing asks for a different kind of control: long sequences of feathers share a direction without becoming interchangeable. Among the roofs, short angular passages establish structures whose actual size on the sheet is minute. The technique permits these different tasks to be pursued within one design. ^[22]

Lippmann also describes the scraper and burnisher used to remove raised metal, smooth the surface and alter engraved work. Engraving therefore allows correction as well as incision. The finished image can conceal decisions made during its production, just as a dark printed area can conceal the individual channels responsible for it. His handbook’s distinction between cutting with a burin and biting exposed metal with acid also explains why an engraving should be distinguished from an etching. ^[22]

The pale sky plays an active part in the result. A narrow feather tip or a cup’s contour needs little surrounding detail to remain conspicuous there. In the valley, comparable marks compete with trees, roofs and rock. The distribution of empty and densely worked areas changes how quickly information can be absorbed. Seen at its actual size, the print repeatedly encourages a close approach followed by a return to the whole.

Nemesis among gifts and sales

Dürer’s journal reveals a different scale of activity: prints carried between people. In the 1913 translation by Rudolph Tombo, edited by Roger Fry, Dürer records giving Master Agidius a Saint Eustace and a Nemesis . The surrounding passage concerns other prints carried to a sculptor, presents received, money changed and an agreement with his host. The named engraving belongs within the practical exchanges of travelling life. ^[23]

Another entry lists Nemesis among prints given to a Portuguese factor. Adam and Eve , Saint Jerome , Hercules , Saint Eustace and Melancholy accompany it, together with smaller prints and books. Dürer says that he gave the same quantity to the other Portuguese contact, Rodrigo. The whole assortment is valued together; it does not supply a separate price for Nemesis . The entry also records Rodrigo’s gift of a green parrot to Dürer’s wife, bringing an unexpected living creature into this traffic in images and objects. ^[23]

Before leaving Cologne in 1520, Dürer gave a Nemesis to Nicolas’s man. Later, the journal includes one in a mixed sale comprising other engravings, etched pieces, woodcuts and books, with a total of eight florins. These records distinguish occasions of giving from an occasion of selling. They also show the usefulness of a repertoire that could be assembled into different groups. A print made around the beginning of the century still had a place in the artist’s dealings almost twenty years afterwards. ^[23]

The entries supply a name, recipients and circumstances. Their economy is itself revealing: Dürer identifies the print without explaining the goddess’s attributes. Those who received or bought it had the image to examine, but the journal does not tell us how each understood it. Circulation is documented more securely than a uniform response among its first viewers. ^[23]

One plate, different impressions

Surviving sheets continue that history in different collections. Cleveland’s impression, 1943.178, measures 33.3 × 23 centimetres and is catalogued as the second of two states. Tokyo’s G.1979-0006 measures 33.1 × 22.9 centimetres and was purchased in 1980. These dimensions and histories belong to the individual objects. They should be kept distinct from the Rosenwald plate measurement and its larger sheet. ^{[24] [21] [1]}

S. R. Koehler’s catalogue of the 1897 Grolier Club exhibition makes the differences between impressions particularly concrete. His Nemesis entry compares two early examples. He praises one for its relatively clear printing, while describing excess ink in the other’s closely worked drapery and the back of the figure. He treats the pair as evidence of the printer’s influence on the same engraved design. A fuller impression could strengthen darkness while making fine work less distinct. ^[2]

Koehler also discusses examples with and without a perpendicular scratch below the bridge, the distinction underlying his account of first and second states. He regarded the scratch as an accident rather than an artistic redesign. His discussion usefully separates two kinds of difference: a change to the printing surface and a variation in the ink left on it. His broader chronology and aesthetic judgements belong to nineteenth-century scholarship; the comparison does not assign every surviving sheet an exact printing date. ^[2]

Paper offers another line of inquiry. The NGV’s watermark guide uses Nemesis to explain measurements in relation to chain lines and recommends combining watermark evidence with catalogues and provenance. Neither a familiar motif nor a photograph of the printed front can, by itself, settle the date and history of every impression. ^{[25] [18]}

A wing in Ruskin’s classroom

The Ashmolean preserves an unusual later object: a wing cut from an impression of Nemesis . Its irregular sheet measures 11.4 × 11.6 centimetres, with the upper right cut away to exclude the back of the head. John Ruskin presented it to the Ruskin Drawing School in 1875; this does not establish who cut it. Isolated from the body and valley, the feather pattern becomes a concentrated specimen of engraved description. ^[26]

Ruskin’s own teaching text explains why plumage mattered to him. In section 113 of Lectures on Art , he considers the scope still available for artists studying animals. His praise of Dürer’s wing forms part of that argument. He places it near the highest achievement of art in depicting feathers, then directs attention towards things a learner might still discover: a pelican rearranging wet plumes, a vulture’s or swift’s wing contour, and a flamingo’s colours. Admiration for an established master becomes an invitation to observe further. ^[27]

His catalogue and notes supply a more combative purpose. The Dürer fragment shared a frame with Ruskin’s enlarged study of a wing from Rembrandt’s Angels Appearing to the Shepherds . In his notes on that etching, Ruskin attacked the relation between its laborious execution, uncertain lines and attempted light effect. He then explained that the enlarged wing would help students judge form by comparison with Dürer. This was an exercise designed to make a preference visible and teach a particular standard of judgement. ^{[28] [27]}

Such a judgement belongs to Ruskin’s teaching, with its forceful likes and dislikes. It need not determine a present-day assessment of either artist. What it adds to the engraving’s history is a specific act of attention: a small part of a complicated allegory became something students could compare, scrutinise and use. The print’s later life could depend on the description of a feather as much as on the identification of its goddess. ^[27]

Return to the complete sheet and the wing once again joins the outstretched arm, hanging straps and streaming cloth. The valley resumes its place beneath them. Following one detail has made the larger arrangement more familiar, without exhausting it. Dürer’s engraving sustains both movements of attention: towards the individual mark and back towards the world that those marks bring together.