Chiaroscuro woodcut printed in bluish gray and black on cream laid paper, 1522. 430x325 mm; 17x12 7/8 inches, thread margins. A superb, well-inked Meder IIIa impression. Crescent watermark (Meder 258). Ex-collection Colnaghi, London, with their stock number in pencil verso.
The original, extremely scarce lifetime impressions were printed in black from the line block. It was only in the early 1600s that there was a resurgence of attention paid to Dürer's work and the chiaroscuro blocks were created partly to mask wear to the original line block. Both this portait of Varnbüler and Dürer's famous woodcut The Rhinoceros, 1515, were printed as chiaroscuro woodcuts by the Amsterdam publisher Willem Janssen.
The drawing for which Dürer based this woodcut is in the collection of the Albertina, Vienna. Around the early 1520s, Dürer completed several portraits with the intent of producing large-scale woodcuts, though only two subjects were realized: Ulrich Varnbüler and Emperor Maximilian I. Both woodcuts are extremely scarce; we have found approximately only 12 impressions of each at auction in the past 30 years.
Varnbüler (1471-circa 1544) was the chief clerk of the Imperial Supreme Court of Maximilian I from 1507 and was made chancellor of it in 1531. He was well known to Dürer in Nuremberg as a humanist and friend of Erasmus (see lot 33), and Willibald Pirckheimer.
Strauss records only 11 chiaroscuro impressions of this woodcut in museum collections, including an example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. We have located only 2 impressions with chiaroscuro at auction in the past 30 years. Bartsch 155; Meder 256.
