OMAHA, NEBRASKA.- The Joslyn Art Museum presents "Faith and Humanism: Engravings and Woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer," on view through March 9. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is widely considered to be the outstanding German artist of the Renaissance period, perhaps even of all time. He not only executed paintings and drawings of the highest quality, but also made major contributions to the development of printmaking. In fact, Dürer’s prolific output of masterful woodcuts and engravings, which were admired and collected all over Europe, played an enormously important role in spreading the stylistic innovations that were being introduced by Italian Renaissance masters like Andrea Mantegna and Michelangelo.

Dürer’s art was forged during a time of momentous change in Western Europe. Humanism — the interest in the classical civilizations of Greek and Rome that fueled the Italian Renaissance — was flowing north and shaped the cultural life in Nuremberg, the busy commercial center in southern Germany where Dürer lived and worked. At the same time, the grip of the Catholic Church on the lives and minds of the populace was weakening, and the Protestant Reformation, which occurred near the end of Dürer’s life, was the culmination of a century of change that signaled the end of the Middle Ages.

Before this dramatic historical backdrop, the 54 woodcuts and engravings presented in Faith and Humanism acquire a significance beyond their artistic interest. In addition to introducing us to the extraordinary creative genius and outstanding artistry of one master, Albrecht Dürer, they illustrate the turbulent birth of the modern era in Western Europe.

The exhibition includes some of Dürer’s most famous prints, among them his four “master engravings” (Knight, Death, and the Devil; Melencolia I; St. Jerome in his Study; Adam and Eve), so called because they are unsurpassed achievements of the engraver’s art. In these, even more than in his other superb works, we observe Dürer’s complete mastery of the representational and expressive capabilities of his medium. With a minimum of means — black lines on white paper —he renders surface textures as varied as a knight’s steely armor and a horse’s sleek coat (Knight, Death, and the Devil); evokes the most nuanced effects of light, whether the dramatic brilliance of a comet in the night sky (Melencolia I) or the subtle glow of sunlight through medieval bottle-glass windows (St. Jerome in his Study); and produces shading supple enough to model the lifelike roundness and firmness of muscular human figures (Adam and Eve).

The selection of prints shown in Faith and Humanism is only a fraction of Dürer’s prodigious oeuvre, but the images reveal the full scope and intellectual depth of this artist’s fertile imagination. Thematically the works range from allegorical representations of abstract ideas (Melencolia I), to deeply felt illustrations of Biblical subjects (The Passion of Christ; The Life of the Virgin); from seemingly objective observations of contemporary life (The Peasant and His Wife at Market), to imagined scenes from Greek mythology (Hercules at the Crossroads). As disparate as these themes may appear at first glance — veering from the secular to the religious, from the pagan to the Christian — on further consideration they are seen to be tied together by a common thread: the precepts of spiritual truths that Dürer derived from the dual forces Humanism and Faith.

This exhibition is organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.