Lot and His Daughters (Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom)

Lot and His Daughters (Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom): Albrecht Durer

Price: Price on Request
Art Type: Oil Painting
Size:
English Comments: 0
International Comments: 0
Creating Date:
Introduction and Works of Albrecht Durer >>

Contemporary-Art.org

Albrecht Durer Oil Painting - Lot and His Daughters (Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom)

Keywords: Lot, Daughters, Lot, Fleeing, Daughters, Sodom

Work Overview: Lot and His Daughters (Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom)
Dürer, Albrecht
c. 1498
Oil and tempera on panel
52.4 x 42.2 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington

This delightfully spontaneous panel depicts Lot and his two daughters fleeing from the destruction of Sodom. In the story from Genesis, two angels warn Lot that he should escape before God destroys the city for its sins. Lot is told that his family must not look back, otherwise they will be turned into pillars of salt.

In Dürer's panel, Lot leads the way, dressed in a warm fur-lined coat and a magnificent turban. He carries a basket of eggs and has a flask of wine slung over his shoulder on his stick. His two daughters follow several paces behind, one bearing a bundle on her head and the other with an elegant casket and a distaff and yarn. Far behind them, near the towering rocks, is Lot's wife, transformed into a brown pillar of salt. In the distance the town of Sodom explodes with brimstone and fire, huge columns of smoke belching up into the sky. Gomorrah, in the far distance, suffers a similar fate.

This depiction of Lot's flight is not the main picture, but the reverse of a panel of the Virgin and Child. The two sides are quite different, not only in subject-matter but also in style. The Lot panel is painted in a loose, spontaneous manner, whereas the Virgin and Child is much more finely worked. However, Dürer must have intended them to be seen together. The panel was painted for the Nuremberg merchant family of Haller, whose arms appear in the bottom left corner of the panel of the Virgin.

Virgin and Child at a Window was long assumed to be the work of the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini, because of its composition and colouring. In 1934 it was identified as a Dürer, painted about three years after his return from Venice. It was bought by Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, who owned it until 1950.

This scene is painted on the reverse side of Dürer's Madonna and Child. The story of Lot and his daughters comes from the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis. In the foreground, Lot and his two children are portrayed fleeing from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which erupt in blinding explosions of fire in the background. Lot's wife is visible on the path at the upper left in the middle distance. She has been turned into a pillar of salt for disobeying the divine command by looking back on the scene of retribution.

This scene was important for the moral lesson it taught. Like the story of Noah and the flood, that of Lot and the desolation of Sodom and Gomorrah was an allegory demonstrating the power of God to save the righteous.

Since the combination of the story of Lot with the depiction of the Virgin and Child is extremely unusual, the exact relation of the two images remains unclear. However, they could be understood as two examples of the value of a just life and of the pervasive grace of God, especially if the Madonna and Child on the obverse was intended as a private devotional image.

Copyright Statement:
All the reproduction of any forms about this work unauthorized by Singing Palette including images, texts and so on will be deemed to be violating the Copyright Laws.
To cite this webpage, please link back here.

>> English Comments >> Chinese Comments >> French Comments >> German Comments >>Report

Lot and His Daughters (Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom)

Albrecht Durer

Work Overview