?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
MASTER MZ The King's Sons Shooting their Father's Corpse.
Engraving, circa 1500. 177x247 mm; 7x9 3/4 inches, thread margins. Large bull's head with a caduceus (serpent and cross) watermark (Lehrs 18, which he notes for early impressions of this print). Ex-collection Graf Yorck von Wartenburg (Lugt 2669, verso); and Holtkott, ink stamp verso (not in Lugt). A superb, dark impression of this extremely scarce print.
The subject of the current work is not the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, as Bartsch erroneously identified it, but one based on a tale in the 13th-century Gesta Romanorum (see Shestack, Fifteenth Century Engravings of Northern Europe, Washington, DC, 1968, catalogue number 147).
Lehrs knew of only approximately 25 early impressions and cites one of the finest early impressions as that in Munich, which has the same watermark as the current work (though he notes that the Munich impression has condition defects). Bartsch 4; Lehrs 21.
