DÜRER, Albrecht
(b. 1471, Nürnberg, d. 1528, Nürnberg)

The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (detail)

1508
Oil on canvas transferred from panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The representation of the violence of the torturers and the various positions of their victims, on their knees and lying on the ground, demonstrates the wide knowledge Dürer had acquired about the human form and laws of perspective. A refined psychological sensibility and pictorial mastery characterize almost all the figures of this tragic scene: for example, the almost cinematographic sequence of the people who are made to fall from the cliff in the top left.