Jabach Altar: Job on the Dungheap

The Jabach Altar: Job on the Dungheap, painted around 1504 for the Jabach altarpiece and now split between Frankfurt and Cologne, is among Dürer's most emotionally powerful devotional images. Job, stripped of everything by divine permission and afflicted with plague sores by Satan, sits on the dungheap while his wife pours water over him — a gesture that is simultaneously humiliation and the kindness of one suffering person for another. Dürer renders the aged Job's body with the same precise observation he brought to his self-portraits: real flesh, real suffering, real human dignity persisting through humiliation. The painting belongs to the tradition of plague imagery with which late medieval culture confronted the most terrifying aspect of its existence.

Executed with innovative printmaking and attention to brilliant draftsmanship, the work reveals Albrecht Dürer's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.