Christ Taking Leave of His Mother
Artist Albrecht Dürer
Accession number 1990-2
With this print, the 40-year-old Albrecht Dürer may be looking back to his 19-year-old self, leaving home for the first time to embark on a four-year Wanderjahre, travelling throughout Germany and probably visiting Switzerland and the Netherlands. On this journey he paints what is now considered to be the first definitive self-portrait in the history of Western art. Upon his return to Nuremberg he marries, opens his own workshop, and, in 1498, becomes the first known artist to plan, create, and publish his own book.
In 1511, he creates the series of woodcuts of ‘The Life of the Virgin’ which includes this image of ‘Christ Taking Leave of His Mother’. The 30-year-old Christ is taking leaving of his mother to begin his itinerant ministry around Galilee. He is resolutely taking his first step away from her, she is on her knees either pleading with him or praying for him. When Mary presented her son at the Temple in Jerusalem, she was warned that a sword would pierce her heart as a result of her son’s actions and her anguish here at his leaving may be in keeping with that prophecy.
This image takes on a degree of universality when we reflect on all those siblings who have left home and family in order to find work and an income to support those who remain at home. The leave-taking involved, as in Dürer’s image, is in the knowledge that the child may not return home again.
