Antlers and Aggression: Sensing Dragons in Early Modern Germany and Sweden

This paper examines two extraordinary late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century artworks that fuse natural and crafted materials to create complex, multi-sensory encounters: the so-called Drachenleuchter (dragon chandelier) designed by Albrecht Dürer and executed by Veit Stoß in 1522 for the Nuremberg Rathaus, and Bernt Notke’s monumental St. George and the Dragon (c. 1489), prominently displayed in Stockholm Cathedral. Both works incorporate real antlers into polychrome sculptural forms, entangling the organic with the fantastic in ways that invite not only visual but also tactile, olfactory, and affective responses.

The Drachenleuchter, with its triple-headed, winged hybrid (part dog, part serpent, part stag) once suspended above political deliberations in Nuremberg’s central political space, cast flickering light from its gilded and grotesque surface. The integrated antlers animate evoke the body of a hunted animal, intensifying its strangeness. Notke’s St. George, meanwhile, famously incorporates antlers, human hair, and leather to create the dragon's form, weaponizing nature itself in the enactment of Christian triumph. The raw materiality of the antlers—shiny, branching, and tactile—gives the scene a haptic immediacy that exceeds mere allegory.

Both works exemplify early modern strategies for engaging viewers through more than sight alone. By reading these objects through ecocritical and material studies lenses, this paper foregrounds the sensory lives of hybrid artworks and argues that antlers, textured and resonant with the intense sensory experiences of hunting culture, mediated viewers’ embodied perception of myth, menace, and miracle in new and potent ways.