Page "Albrecht Dürer" Paragraph 45

Dürer's later works have also been claimed to show Protestant sympathies.

For example, his engraving of The Last Supper of 1523 has often been understood to have an evangelical theme, focussing as it does on Christ espousing the Gospel, as well the inclusion of the Eucharistic cup, an expression of Protestant utraquism, although this interpretation has been questioned.

The delaying of the engraving of St Philip, completed in 1523 but not distributed until 1526, may have been due to Dürer's uneasiness with images of Saints ; even if Dürer was not an iconoclast, in his last years he evaluated and questioned the role of art in religion.