The Bath House, ca. 1496 – 1497

About the Work

Dürer's "The Bath House" is one of the first woodcuts that he created under the influence of the Italian Renaissance following his return from his first trip to Italy. Nudity, making music and drinking refer to the depictions of bacchanals from ancient mythology, a subject area Dürer had become acquainted with in Andrea Mantegna's copper engravings. The artist chose the motif of bathing pleasures that were popular in the late Middle Ages as his scene's outer frame, and thus embedded the depiction in a contemporary context. The "Bath House" can therefore be read as a synthesis of classical reception of antiquity and the North Alpine pictorial tradition, perhaps as an Arcadian symposium moved to Dürer's Nuremberg.