Various Sketches

c. 1515

Pen and brown ink, backed

174 × 292 mm

Praun-, Esterházy collection

The four different drawings of slightly different scales are seemingly unrelated, however, a wind instrument appears in all four of them and the figure of a jester in two of them. Based on its draftsmanship and motifs, the design is related to Dürer’s illustrations for Willibald Pirckheimer’s Latin translation of the Hieroglyphica, a Greek manuscript by Horapollo Niliacus, an Alexandrian of the fourth or fifth centuries AD. The work claimed to explain the hidden meaning of the sacred symbols of ancient Egypt. The present composition can also be linked to Dürer’s marginal drawings for the Book of Hours owned by Emperor Maximilian I. Dürer worked on the illustrations of both works around 1512–1515.