Nuremberg produced the same scene of a dragon and a man with a spear a remarkable number of times before the sixteenth century turned over. I own three of Dürer’s variants. The proportions differ. The dragon does not.
Always coiled, never charging. Always smaller than the horse. Always losing.
I don’t think this was a failure of Dürer’s imagination. I think it was Nuremberg’s. A city commissions the shape of its own comfort, over and over, and calls it art history.
I keep the plate regardless. The linework is genuinely fine, whatever the composition got wrong about scale.
