Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving, The Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), shows the picture of a mounted soldier, sternly looking ahead and seemingly unaware of the threat posed by the two monstrous creatures approaching his horse. In the background, outside of the knight's field of vision and towering high above the group, is a city built on a distant and inaccessible rock. The two planes of the picture are suspended in a state of tension: its foreground with the suggestion of struggle, combat, movement and its static background hinting at repose, safety and deliverance. The tension results from an implied narrative that reverberates with traditional, near archetypal meanings: the figure of the miles christianus engaged in a struggle against the Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins, the tortuous path of the Christian pilgrim, and the promise of the heavenly kingdom as the ultimate goal of the spiritual quest.

Something about Dürer's engraving, though, betrays a more urgently topical, precise meaning, derived from its relevance within its specific historical context. The knight, conspicuously solitary on his quest, has been interpreted as the representative of a new quintessentially lay spirituality and theology. As a figure of the active life, the knight symbolises a newly emancipated Christian layman, confidently advancing on his own, individual and lonely spiritual quest. His posture makes him the embodiment of a ‘virile’ lay spirituality, and his imperturbable gaze expresses something like an Erasmian self-mastery. The Rider's gaze points outside of the frame of the engraving, beyond the limits of the wasteland depicted towards an eschatological resolution, dimly shadowed in the city on the rock. Such Erasmian associations are often invoked with reference to Dürer’s supposed source, Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani, a didactic treatise built around the central metaphor of the Christian warfare.