A bearded old man in a hood holds the baby over a basin.
Bible in art · Luke
The Circumcision
Dürer · c. 1504–1505
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Dürer made the woodcuts of the Life of the Virgin in Nuremberg around 1501–05 and sold them as single sheets; in 1511 he published the series as a book.
The rite takes place in a vaulted room before a doorway crowned with Gothic tracery. An old bearded man holds the child over a basin, a man kneels in front of him with his back to us, and onlookers crowd around; at the left a man holds a tall twisted candle.
From the text
- The child circumcised when eight days had passed (Luke 2:21)
- “He was named Jesus, the name the angel had given Him” (Luke 2:21)
The artist’s own
- A crowd of onlookers and attendants with jugs and tools
- A room of Dürer’s time with curtains and Gothic ornament
Details
The child
The rite
A man kneels at the child, his back to us.
The candle
A man holds a long braided candle.
The tracery
Carved Gothic branches and figures over the doorway.
Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Dudley P. Allen Fund, 1959.99.11) · Woodcut · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).