The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom

Description

The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom places a religious narrative within an intricate landscape in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of around 1496. The woman and child in the foreground dominate the first impression, sheltered by rugged rock. The saint’s smaller, crawling figure draws the viewer into the farther reaches of the scene.

The composition joins intimate human forms with a setting of stone, foliage and distant buildings. Closely spaced engraved lines describe these different surfaces and guide the eye from the foreground toward the horizon. The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom rewards sustained attention because its narrative does not reveal itself all at once. This catalog entry is associated with a separate Metropolitan Museum of Art example of the same composition, preserving its individual source identity.