Knight, Death and the Devil

The engraving - titled Knight, Death and the Devil and signed and dated 1513 - was sold in an online auction by Rare Book Auctions in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on Wednesday, surpassing a guide price range of £10,000-£20,000.

“There are sunken roads here, overgrown with thorn-bushes and with old, twisted trees with their gnarled roots, which look exactly like that road in the etching by Dürer,” Vincent tells Theo, referring to Knight, Death and the Devil.

His work is familiar to every German, in particular his two great engravings, Knight, Death and the Devil, and Melancholia, which were long taken as two aspects of one national self-portrait: the knight riding bravely out to do what must be done; the figure of creative genius slumped on the floor, aware of so many creative possibilities that he is unable to act at all.

“The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” is the most celebrated of Dürer’s engravings, and dates from 1513.

There is, indeed, some fatality about that copy of Durer’s ‘Knight, Death, and the Devil,’ which seems really ill-omened, for this is the second time it has fallen.