Cardinal Matthaeus Schiner as the knight in Albrecht Duerer's 'Knight, Death and Devil'

The dissertation attempts to explain the disparity between a number of explanations for Albrecht Durer's 1513 engraving Knight, Death and Devil. It advances a theoretical historical identity for the knight that incorporates a variety of previous theses. It begins with Erwin Panofsky's 1943 identification of the knight with the Christian soldier of Desiderius Erasmus' 1504 Enchiridion militis Christiani. It continues through analyses made in the wake of the 1971 Nuremberg festival in honor of Durer to the present date. Taking into account several diverse methodologies, it finds common features in previous studies that view the print as a memento mori, a Robber Knight, and various historical figures. The study concludes that much of the imagery of the engraving can be explained by the hypothesis that Durer intended his knight as a caricature of Swiss cardinal Matthaus Schiner (1465--1522). It concludes as well that Durer employed devices of scholastic allegory in constructing this caricature.