bavarikon4UDescription
"Landscape with a Cannon" from 1518 – several men in Oriental and Hungarian costume absorbed in surveying a cannon – is one of the greatest landscape paintings of the early 16th century. The mountain with the two peaks is the Ehrenbürg in Franconian Switzerland, popularly known as "Walberla". The two villages depicted probably represent the towns of Kirchehrenbach and Pretzfeld; the lake in the background, on the other hand, has no real equivalent.
This print is the oldest form of etching, iron etching, which came into use around 1493. After the middle of the 16th century, iron etching hardly played a role compared to etching on copper plates, because although iron was easy to etch, it also had considerable technical disadvantages. It was susceptible to rust and etchings in copper allowed for a finer and more even stroke.
Only six iron etchings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) are known, all of which were made between 1515 and 1518. The "Landscape with a Cannon" print is his last and at the same time largest work in this technique.
The Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg owns two copies of this famous iron etching by Dürer: one comes from the Margraves of Ansbach’s graphics collection, the other only came to the university library in 1931 with the Luthardt Collection.