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Lot Essay
This very rare print is loosely inspired by Albrecht Dürer's engravings Five Soldiers and a Turk on Horseback (Meder 81), created about five years early, around 1495.
The anonymous printmaker often appropriated elements of Dürer's earliest engravings. He seems to have been associated with the court of Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria, in Munich, but appears to have had a very short career as an engraver. Of his 22 known prints, six bear the dates 1500, 1501 or 1503. Then his production seems to come to an abrupt halt. Perplexingly, it also appears that his plates are taken out of print around this time: only very few early impressions, usually with the watermarks High Crown or Bull's Head, were printed or have survived. After a hiatus of approximately fifty years, the plates were then being reprinted, usually on a thinner paper with many small inclusions, which we would broadly date to the second half of the 16th century. What happened to the Master MZ in the meantime remains a mystery. Perhaps he lost his life to the plague or another illness, suffered some other mishap or simply abandoned printmaking, until another printer somehow obtained his plates in the latter half of the century.
Even the later impressions are uncommon, and the present subject is particularly rare: we have only found one other impression offered at auction within the last 30 years.
The anonymous printmaker often appropriated elements of Dürer's earliest engravings. He seems to have been associated with the court of Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria, in Munich, but appears to have had a very short career as an engraver. Of his 22 known prints, six bear the dates 1500, 1501 or 1503. Then his production seems to come to an abrupt halt. Perplexingly, it also appears that his plates are taken out of print around this time: only very few early impressions, usually with the watermarks High Crown or Bull's Head, were printed or have survived. After a hiatus of approximately fifty years, the plates were then being reprinted, usually on a thinner paper with many small inclusions, which we would broadly date to the second half of the 16th century. What happened to the Master MZ in the meantime remains a mystery. Perhaps he lost his life to the plague or another illness, suffered some other mishap or simply abandoned printmaking, until another printer somehow obtained his plates in the latter half of the century.
Even the later impressions are uncommon, and the present subject is particularly rare: we have only found one other impression offered at auction within the last 30 years.