Prodigal Son

The first things to meet the eye are mouths and hands. Pigs press their snouts into a narrow trough; piglets gather at a round basin below it. Beside them a young man joins his hands, lifting them clear of the feeding group. His face turns upwards, but his bare knee and stretched foot remain close to the animals' feet. Dürer places these different uses of the body almost within touching distance. Across the man's back, the broad planes of a damaged garment lead towards the small, tightly interlocked fingers. ^[1]

The Prodigal Son is an engraving of about 1496. The National Gallery of Art's Rosenwald impression, 1943.3.3459, is on laid paper: its plate measures 24.6 × 18.8 centimetres and its sheet 24.9 × 19 centimetres. The catalogue identifies the design as Meder 28. An AD monogram appears at the bottom, without a date. Rosenwald bought this sheet in 1940 and gave it to the gallery in 1943. ^[2]

Words before movement

The subject comes from Luke 15:11–32. The younger of two sons requests his share of the family property, travels abroad and spends it. When famine comes, he takes work feeding swine. He wants the animals' food, and nobody gives him anything. Remembering that his father's hired workers have bread to spare, he decides to return, confess his sin and ask for a servant's place. The English comparison here follows the Authorized Version in Oxford's 1833 reprint of the 1611 Bible; this later translation does not identify the biblical edition Dürer knew. ^[17]

Luke distinguishes the decision from its execution. The son imagines getting up, travelling and addressing his father before the account tells us that he does so. That interval makes room for Dürer's kneeling figure. His hands articulate an appeal, while his body has yet to begin the journey. The engraving can hold together physical hunger, acknowledgement of wrongdoing and an imagined future without illustrating each as a separate incident. The whole farmyard belongs to the same suspended moment. ^[17]

The speech he prepares is also a calculation about belonging. He thinks he has forfeited the name of son and hopes to secure the position of a worker. The story will overturn that expectation. His father sees him at a distance, runs to meet him and kisses him; servants bring a robe, ring and shoes, and a calf is killed for the celebration. In the engraving, those acts remain ahead. The clothes and exposed leg acquire added poignancy when we remember what will eventually be given to replace his present condition. ^[17]

At the other end of the parable, the elder brother refuses to enter the celebration. He has worked faithfully and resents the welcome given to someone who has squandered the family's goods. The father comes out to address him too. Thus both brothers, in different circumstances, stand outside a shared household life. Dürer's choice of the younger son's need allows us to encounter him before the elder brother's accusation. His request has to be considered before anyone calculates whether the later feast is deserved. ^[17]

The chapter begins with another complaint about company and eating: the Pharisees and scribes object to Jesus receiving sinners. The stories of the recovered sheep and recovered coin precede the two sons, each bringing rejoicing after a loss. This context gives the farmyard a place within a larger argument about repentance and welcome. Feeding is everywhere in the engraving, but human fellowship is missing. The viewer who knows the story can imagine the meal to come while continuing to look at a man who has no place at it yet. ^[17]

The gesture does not make the scene a literal transcription of a verse. Luke supplies the son's inward speech; Dürer supplies the lifted face, clasped hands and kneeling body. Prayer becomes a way of making an unspoken decision visible. We cannot hear what the man says or see the recipient of his appeal. That restriction concentrates the image on his present condition, while the remembered narrative carries the possibility of an answer. ^[17]

The scale of the farmyard

Look above the hands and the picture changes scale. The small human gesture sits beneath an enormous sloping roof on the left. Its long courses descend almost to the row of ground-floor doors. A much paler gable rises opposite, with windows that look tiny against the wall. The son occupies only a fraction of this built enclosure. The buildings have the bulk to outlast the action taking place in front of them. ^[17]

The roofs are differently made and differently angled. On the left, nearly continuous strokes describe a steep surface, interrupted by a dark projecting patch and a small opening with horizontal bars. Near the centre, individual roof courses become more legible. On the right, a rough, fringed eave runs above upright boards and an arched door. These changes prevent the architecture from becoming one uniform screen. Each structure offers a different pace of looking, from the sweep of a great slope to a notch, joint or narrow opening.

Several routes into the distance can be followed. The trough runs diagonally from the foreground towards the son's hands. Beyond the animals, light ground opens towards the smaller central building. A pair of wheels, seen obliquely, interrupts the yard. Behind them, projecting timbers and the recess beneath a roof add a further layer. Dürer alternates barriers with openings: broad animal backs in front, open earth behind, then walls and dark apertures. The eye moves readily through places that the kneeling body has not yet crossed. ^{[17] [1]}

Small incidents keep this large enclosure from feeling empty. Birds perch high on the left and cross the sky. Below, a patch of water or wet ground lies beside the buildings; a few small birds stand nearby. The wheel rims repeat a circular shape very different from the triangular gables. Such details are easy to overlook when attention stays with the protagonist. On a second inspection, they distribute activity across the yard and make the human figure part of a much busier field of life.

Vegetation fits into the gaps. A dense rounded tree rises between the roofs, with taller sprays behind it. A small leafless tree twists in front of the pale central wall. A thin trunk climbs beside another building, and irregular patches break up the ground near the right-hand structures. These plants occupy particular places instead of supplying a continuous landscape border. The contrast between their branching forms and the long roof edges makes the architecture feel more solid.

The buildings' specificity does not establish a named farm. What matters within the image is the accumulation of usable spaces: doors, loft openings, covered recesses, projecting supports and places to keep animals. The son has shelter within sight, yet no other person approaches him in the foreground. That separation between accommodation and welcome belongs to the image's reading of Luke. A substantial place can still leave someone without the help he needs. ^[17]

A body among animals

The son is turned enough for us to see his back and the side of his face. His shoulder slopes towards the bent elbow; the forearm then rises to the hands. The head repeats this upward change of direction. Long curls spread across the neck and shoulder, contrasting with the broader, smoother passages of the sleeve. His profile has a clear edge against the light yard. The relatively small face remains easy to find among much larger shapes. ^[17]

Below the belt, cloth bunches and hangs in pointed folds. Openings and ragged edges interrupt its surface. A fold projects across the thigh, while the exposed lower leg ends in a foot extended behind him. These changes make the act of kneeling tangible: the body has folded down into a position that walking would have to undo. Read beside the son's resolve to rise, this arrangement gives the next action a visible starting point. ^[17]

Around him, animal bodies face several ways. One pig shows its flank close to his hip; others converge on the long trough from the right. Their ears and snouts crowd its narrow rim. Piglets below approach the round vessel from different sides, while another bends towards the ground. The variation avoids a simple procession towards a single focus. The man is surrounded by separate appetites and repeated movements, against which the gathered hands form a particularly compact shape.

A related animal drawing survives in Chicago. The Art Institute's Young Bull , 1965.408, is dated about 1496: pen and black ink on ivory laid paper, 17.5 × 14 centimetres. Its 1508 inscription is a later, erroneous addition. The museum proposes study from nature and relates its hindquarters to this engraving. It also identifies revisions of the pose. The sheet is evidence for attention to an individual animal, rather than a complete compositional plan. Its open pen work and isolated body differ from the cropped bovine at the print's left edge, where the body must fit among other forms. The relationship concerns a usable part of an animal, without establishing a literal transfer procedure. ^[18]

Cutting and printing the yard

These varied surfaces reach us through ink printed from incisions. Friedrich Lippmann's Engraving and Etching , translated into English by Martin Hardie in 1906 from the edition revised by Max Lehrs, describes the burin as a steel tool pushed with the palm. The plate can turn to meet its movement. The point cuts a furrow in the copper; a scraper removes unwanted raised metal, and a burnisher can smooth a scraped area or reduce a line. The resulting image involves the resistance of metal as well as the movement of a hand. ^[19]

Lippmann distinguishes the burin's work from etching, in which a needle opens a protective ground and acid bites the exposed metal. Both processes make recesses that hold ink. His descriptions also allow for revision: scraping and burnishing can remove or diminish marks before further work. The apparent firmness of a printed contour need not mean that the metal offered no opportunity for change. This general possibility supplies no evidence for a particular sequence of corrections in The Prodigal Son . ^[19]

On the son's back, diagonal strokes gather into a dark patch beneath the hair and along the waist. The shoulder is lighter; folds in the sleeve change direction as they approach the elbow. At the lower garment, the darkest channels narrow between light ridges. Across the pig beside him, strokes curve along a swelling flank. The roof behind is more insistent in its downward direction. Similar black marks create quite different impressions of cloth, hide and roofing because they turn and accumulate differently. ^[17]

The pale wall at the centre gives the eye a useful resting place. Short horizontal marks and small openings articulate it without filling every interval. Near its base, stronger shadows separate it from the ground. In the foreground, the small vessel has a firm curved rim and horizontal bands; the trough has long straight edges. A reader can follow these structures even where neighbouring bodies overlap. The economy lies in deciding where a line is needed as much as in multiplying lines everywhere.

Printing adds another set of decisions. Lippmann describes spreading ink over the plate and wiping its smooth parts, leaving ink in the incisions. Damp paper passes with the plate through the press under blankets. Pressure brings the paper into contact with the recessed ink. He gives the printer's handling of wiping and ink an active role in the result. This is a general account of intaglio printing, not evidence that a particular surviving Prodigal Son sheet was printed by Dürer's own hands. ^[19]

The process helps explain why the light areas deserve attention. In the image, a bright ridge of cloth and a stretch of open yard can be made from the same unmarked paper. Their apparent materials emerge from the marks around them. What looks like an abundance of solid things is also a carefully distributed pattern of printed ink and exposed support. The son's hands depend on those intervals of light for their clarity. ^[19]

Reading a surviving sheet

The Pushkin Museum dates its impression Г-2097 to the first quarter of the sixteenth century, separately from the design's approximate 1496 date. It records 245 × 187 millimetres, no watermark, and passage from the Hermitage through the Rumyantsev Museum in 1862 to the Pushkin in 1924. Its comparison describes Г-5160 and Г-89940 as grey and weak, with worn strokes and later watermark evidence; Г-8995 is clearer and assigned to the mid-sixteenth century. These are assessments of specified sheets. They distinguish the image's invention from later printing without making later date alone a verdict on quality. ^[20]

There are several ways for impressions to differ. In Lippmann's account, repeated printing and wiping can wear the most delicate incisions until they retain less ink. Fine transitions can diminish while deeper cuts remain effective. Separately, wiping and the amount of ink affect a newly taken impression. A strongly printed dark passage therefore cannot, by itself, tell the whole story of a sheet. The handbook also warns that the very first impressions need not be the best. ^[19]

For this engraving, an older catalogue makes the problem unusually concrete. S. R. Koehler's 1897 Grolier Club catalogue lists two impressions and a modern copy under The Prodigal Son . He describes one impression in pure black ink, with slight perpendicular scratches still visible, and another in brownish ink, with the scratches almost entirely worn away. Both are described as cleanly wiped. He also points to long vertical scratches in the upper part and at the sides of very early examples in Boston, London and Berlin. ^[1]

Those scratches give looking a second purpose. They need not depict a roof, a wall or a tree to carry information. In Koehler's comparison, marks outside the intended description help distinguish particular printings. His remarks do not let us identify the collection or date of an unrelated reproduction, but they show why apparently incidental lines can matter to the history of an impression. Reading the subject and examining evidence of the plate's condition are different activities that can take place on the same sheet. ^[1]

Koehler's entry also preserves the instability of earlier dating. It reports Retberg's placement before 1495 and Heller's much wider range of 1486–1500. These differences show how much latitude earlier cataloguers allowed in placing an undated print. The same entry dismisses the proposed likeness of Dürer in the young man. Long hair and a recognisable profile cannot establish a sitter. The scene gives us a protagonist whose physical presence is vivid without supplying a verified personal identity. ^[1]

Lippmann gives paper its own place in the study of an impression. He observed that it travelled through a broad commercial market, and that similar watermark motifs could be used by different mills. His discussion makes paper part of a print's historical circumstances rather than a simple dating label. Scale, texture, ink and the distinction between the printed area and its paper surroundings remain part of encountering an impression. An image reproduced on a uniformly illuminated screen allows only part of that encounter. ^[19]

The National Gallery of Victoria explains that a watermark comes from shaped wire attached to the papermaking mould: less fibre settles there, leaving a thinner design. Comparisons examine the wire shape and its position among the chain lines. NGV advises combining this evidence with catalogues and provenance. A broad motif is not an automatic year; a sheet without a watermark cannot be assigned an early date from that absence alone. ^[21]

Before he gets up

Return to the man's position beside the trough. His fingers are closed together, while animals around him keep their mouths at the food. The body that will have to travel home is still folded on the earth. The buildings offer many visible doors, but the meeting that will change his circumstances lies outside this scene. Dürer gives the decision its own duration. We can know Luke's account of the welcome and still remain here, looking at the difficulty of the moment before it becomes possible to rise. ^[17]