Arms and Armor in the works of Albrecht Dürer

[Philip]

Originally Posted by shayde78

"Landscape with Cannon", 1518
The cannon is decorated with the coat of arms of Nuremberg. It is believed to be the weapon that gave Emperor Maximillian I superior firepower over the Turks. It is not known if the Turk depicted is a prisoner or an ambassador. Durer used his own likeness as the head of the Turk.

There is a strong likelihood that the workshop also produced a very similar cannon for King Sigismund I of Poland, used by his joint Polish-Lithuanian forces in the battle of Orsza (Orsha) in Byelorussia, 1514, in which a Muscovite army was defeated. The battle, and the weapon, are memorialized in the gigantic oil painting "Battle of Orsha", now in the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw. The late arms and art historian Prof. Zdzislaw Zygulski wrote a magisterial article on this work of art, and discusses the cannon in relation to the one in Dürer's 1518 print, in "The Battle of Orsha" , in Robert Held (ed) Art, Arms, and Armour (1979), if you wish to explore the topic further.