Saint Eustace

Anselm Kiefer German

Not on view

In this drawing Kiefer refers to the legend of Saint Eustace, a second-century A.D. Christian martyr who is the subject of a famously large and meticulously detailed engraving by Albrecht Dürer (Saint Eustace, ca. 1501, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919, 19.73.65). According to his legend, Eustace was a noble officer in the army of the Roman emperor Trajan, who, while hunting one day, encountered a stag. This magnificent animal bore a crucifix between his antlers and addressed the soldier in the name of Christ, converting Eustace to Christianity. Basing his image of the stag on photographs he took of a reindeer he saw during a trip to Norway in 1974, Kiefer replaces the crucifix with a radiant painter's palette.

Saint Eustace, Anselm Kiefer (German, born Donaueschingen, 1945), Watercolor and opaque watercolor with traces of colored pencil on paper

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