ABSTRACT
Albrecht Durer depicted male bodies with an intense engagement and a formal and iconographic variety not paralleled in his female figures. Durer envisioned these contradictory ideas of Christian masculinity in his art. This chapter focuses on his Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians, a work comprised solely of male bodies. It exemplifies late medieval piety in its fostering of saint and relic worship and the imitation of Christ. The baptism of the soldiers on Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark rested, linked the Old Testament covenant to Christ's salvific suffering, its reenactment by the martyrs, and further to European Christians, descendants of Noah's son Japheth. An important point from Silverman's analysis for our purposes, however, is the anxiousness and incompleteness of this reinscription within the film's persistent repetition of scopic trauma and male loss. This sense of the potential loss of masculinity, then, remains along with its reinscription.
