Coat of Arms of Wilhelm and Wolfgang Rogendorf

Albrecht Dürer made this sizable coat of arms woodcut for the Rogendorf family, whom he met while en route to the Netherlands, where he had the two large blocks for the work cut. The print survives in only one damaged impression, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. This 19th-century facsimile in the then-new medium of lithography supplies the missing leafage in the lower right and imagines the colored print in black and white. In fact, the surviving sheet’s lavish coloring enhances its heraldic significance: two fields are blue with a golden star above a set of golden battlements; in the others, double-tailed lions appear rampant in red on silver.