Albrecht Dürer, The Knight, Death, and the Devil

Dürer’s 1513 engraving of the knight depicts a grim and determined warrior advancing past death (wearing a crown entwined with a serpent and holding out an hourglass) and the devil (the pig-snouted horned figure wielding a menacing pike). An illustration for Erasmus’s The Handbook of the Militant Christian, this scene is often interpreted as portraying a Christian clad in the armor of righteousness on a path through life beset by death and demonic temptations. Yet the knight in early-sixteenth-century Germany had become a mercenary, selling his martial skills to princes. Some knights waylaid merchants, robbed rich clerics, and held citizens for ransom. The most notorious of these robber-knights, Franz von Sickingen, was declared an outlaw by the emperor and murdered in 1522. (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary / Bridgeman Images.)