Albrecht Dürer designed a monument to the defeated peasants that was never meant to be built

historyThe Public Domain Review1525 · Nuremberg, Germany

Albrecht Dürer designed a monument to the defeated peasants that was never meant to be built

the gist

In 1525, the year the German Peasants' War was crushed, Albrecht Dürer drew a design for a monument to the vanquished peasants. It was published in his Treatise on Measurement as an example of proportion. The base stacks everyday objects such as a lard tub, a chicken basket, a butter keg, a cheese bowl and a kettle, with tools bundled beneath. A slain or sleeping peasant with a sword in his back sits at the top. The uprising had spread across the Holy Roman Empire from 1524, and was crushed by Catholic and Lutheran nobles, with Thomas Müntzer executed after the battle at Frankenhausen. The monument's meaning is ambiguous, and it could be read as mockery, sympathy or a dream image. The text was published by Hieronymus Andreae, who was jailed for his views during the war.

so what

The design shows how even an art-theory diagram can carry political tension, and how the peasants' defeat remained a contested memory long after it ended.

fun fact

The German Peasants' War of 1524 to 1525 was the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.

more on this

background

Albrecht Dürer ( DURE-ər, German: [ˈalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 onward was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.

Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are stylistically more Gothic than the rest of his work, but revolutionised the potential of that medium, while his extraordinary handling of the burin expanded especially the tonal range of his engravings.

From Wikipedia: Albrecht Dürer (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

After Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

key facts

Born: 21 May 1471
Died: 6 April 1528
Known as: painter, printmaker

Facts: Wikidata (CC0)

Image: The Public Domain Review

source: The Public Domain Review ↗

historyThe Public Domain Review1909 · United States

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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