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Albrecht Dürer

The Small Woodcut Passion

1511
Woodcut and letterpress in black, with additions in pen and brown ink on cream laid paper, in modern full red calfskin, sewn on raised bands, with blind fillets around inner-edges of boards, blind lines and gold titling on the spine, and hand-sewn silk headbands
15.9 × 11.9 cm (6.3 × 4.7 in)

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In the collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago · as of July 2026

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FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

Opposite Dürer’s woodcut The Crucifixion (folio C viii verso), a sixteenth-century viewer honed in on this sacred event. He inscribed several lines personalizing his experience of the print below the monk Benedict Cheledonius’s text, where there was room: In Cruce pendentem / rogo te Deum omnipotentem / ut mihi des mentem / te semper amare volentem (I ask you, omnipotent God, hanging on the Cross, that you grant me a mind wishing always to love you). This seems like an intimately pious, original outburst, as it addresses Christ directly, but it actually quotes a well-known Latin prayer from the Hours of the Cross.

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