Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand

It is signed on a cartouche which hangs from the artist's self-portrait in the center, saying Iste faciebat Ano Domini 1508 Albertus Dürer Aleman.

Dürer had used the same subject for a woodcut of some ten years before, but in the new work he eliminated some macabre details such as the torture of the bishop Acacius, having his eyes stripped through a drill.

The painting illustrates the legendary martyrdom of ten thousand Christian soldiers perpetrated on Mount Ararat by the King of Persia, Shapur I, by the order of the Roman emperor Hadrian or Antoninus Pius, or, according to other sources, Diocletian.

In the background are prisoners walking through to a cliff from where they are thrown down against rocks and thorny bushes, as well as scenes of fighting, stoning and hitting with huge clubs.

At the center of the crowded scene, dressed in black, are two characters who walk placidly, apparently unaware of the horrors around them: one is Dürer's self-portrait (holding his signature), the other his friend and humanist Conrad Celtes, who had died a few months before the execution of the painting.

The similar 1496 woodcut.
Detail of the forest.