One of the earliest book illustrations ever printed, this woodcut depicts the grinning figure of Death presiding over a dead woman and her bereaved family. It appeared in 1463 in a popular allegory, Der Ackermann aus Bohmen, published by the first printer of illustrated books, Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg. The spare, outline design, deliberately kept simple to facilitate hand coloring of the print, is also partly a reflection of the primitive state of the woodcutting art at the time.
This early woodcut is from a massive book called The Chronicle of the World, for which Michael Wolgemut and another artist created over 650 illustrations. Albrecht Dürer worked as an apprentice with Wolgemut.
The earliest woodcut attributed to Dürer shows St. Jerome in his study pulling a thorn from a lion's paw; it was used as a frontispiece for a collection of St. Jerome's letters published in Basel in 1492.
