Lot and his daughters

Lot and His Daughters, painted around 1500, depicts the Old Testament story of the patriarch who fled Sodom's destruction and whose daughters subsequently intoxicated him and bore children by him — a narrative that combined rescue from divine judgment with sexual transgression. The subject attracted Dürer as a complex moral narrative set within a dramatic natural event: the city burning in the background, the family fleeing, the moral consequences unfolding in the foreground. His treatment of the landscape — the characteristic mountains and cities of his woodcut tradition translated into oil — and the figures' psychological complexity demonstrate his ability to make morally difficult biblical narratives pictorially and emotionally engaging.

The composition shows Dürer's developing mastery of figural interaction and landscape integration, with careful attention to the narrative moment and expressive characterization of the figures.