Young Bull

This is a small drawing, about seventeen centimeters tall and fourteen wide, made with a pen and black ink on cream-colored paper. It shows a single young steer, a young male of the cattle family, with its head lowered as if grazing. The field it stands in is not drawn, so the animal seems to float on the bare page, and your eyes go straight to its body. Look at how solid it feels. The skin seems pulled tight over a strong frame, and the bones show through. It looks less like a pet than a living, weighty creature.

Start with the body. The artist built its rounded shape with cross-hatching, which means sets of short parallel lines laid over one another to create shadow. Notice how firm and sure the strokes look. Then hunt for fainter, scribbly lines in a few spots: around the hind foot, along the back, and near the muzzle and horns. These are traces of an earlier try. The artist first drew the steer in a slightly different position, with its mouth open, and then changed his mind. He left the first attempt visible.

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg. He first trained as a goldsmith in his father's workshop, then became an apprentice to the painter Michael Wolgemut. Even as a young man he showed a curious mind and great skill at drawing. This sheet, made around 1496, is one of his earliest animal drawings, and it was probably made from a real animal. Its precise style recalls the German master Martin Schongauer, whom Dürer greatly admired. A later hand wrongly wrote the date 1508 on the sheet.

Dürer went on to be a masterful engraver, someone who cuts lines into a metal plate to make prints, and he raised printmaking into an expressive art form. This drawing shows how he worked. He reused the steer's hindquarters in his engraving The Prodigal Son amid the Swine, dated 1494 to 1496, a barnyard scene. The Art Institute of Chicago owns a printed impression of it. So a study made from life became part of a larger story. Look once more at the steer's rear end, the part that traveled into the print.