On this wall are three of the most intricate and celebrated of Albrecht Dürer’s prints, produced in early sixteenth-century Germany. Adam and Eve at center—perhaps the most well-known of Dürer’s works in his lifetime—was copied or adapted by numerous artists, including in painting and sculpture. The two flanking prints, Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melencolia I, are known as two of the so-called Master Engravings. They epitomize the German artist’s virtuosic engraving technique as combined with layered imagery that is perhaps intentionally enigmatic. While Adam and Eve is a biblical story, the other two subjects on display are novel, with no scholarly consensus regarding their intended meanings.

In Adam and Eve, the engraving at center, muscular nude bodies, exemplifying the artist’s study of proportion and of antique sculptural models, stand out against a shadowy Garden of Eden resembling a German forest. The pair are poised to eat from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, shown as a fig tree. Adam grips the branch of an ash tree—the Tree of Life—from which cleverly hangs a cartellino or tablet with the artist’s Latinized signature, which also advertises the labor he put into the print and his home city of Nuremberg. In Knight, Death, and the Devil, the engraving at left, a skull sits on a stump next to the artist’s monogram. A knight forges ahead through difficult terrain despite his frightening entourage. In Melencolia I, the engraving at right, a winged woman sits, head resting on her hand, surrounded by objects associated especially with Geometry and Astronomy. The wreath of herbs encircling her head may be a remedy for an overly melancholic temperament, signaled by her pose and considered under the sway of the planet Saturn. The print is often read as an allegory specifically of creative melancholy, believed by Dürer’s contemporaries to stem from an overactive imagination.

Remarkable in all three engravings is Dürer’s ability to conjure a range of materials and textures exclusively through a network of delicately hatched lines that require considerable effort to produce. In Adam and Eve, note the softness of the cat’s tail as it grazes Eve’s smooth ankle. Or, in Knight, Death, and the Devil, the gnarled branches and roots of the landscape juxtaposed with the knight’s polished armor.