Two nude women

Active in Nuremberg in the 1510s and 1520s, Ludwig Krug pursued a successful career as a goldsmith, sculptor, and printmaker. This engraving, one of sixteen he made during his brief but masterful engagement with the technique, depicts two nude women standing arm in arm, with drapery flowing around but in no way concealing their bodies. These figures are quotations of Albrecht Dürer's "Little Fortune" of about 1496 and famous "Four Nude Women" of 1497. Krug, however, transforms the older master's nudes into an overt allegory of transcience by including a skull and hourglass in one of the women's hands. Although the two figures do not appear markedly different in age, one, with loose hair, has a rounded belly, suggesting that she is pregnant or at least of childbearing age, while the other, who stares at the skull, has carefully delineated wrinkles in her face. The print thus encompasses gestation; early womanhood; middle age; and, with the skull, death, altogether raising the possibility that the composition could be understood as an allegory of the Four Ages of Women. That this was how the print was interpreted in the sixteenth century is suggested by an engraved copy formerly attributed to Giulio Campagnola (Bartsch 2518.016) that shows more pronounced differentiation in the figures' ages. Krug's engraving also anticipates such works as Hans Baldung Grien's painting of the 1540s "The Ages of Women and Death" (Museo del Prado, Madrid), in which the distance between the ages of the two women is immediately apparent.