Relay and Delay: Dürer's Triumphal Chariots in the Era of the Post

Printed images from the early modern period are often described in terms of their 'mobility', which refers to the geographical breadth reached by different impressions, the phased stages of ownership, and the improvisational behaviours of recipients who coloured, cut, pasted, or wrote upon the pages.1 This essay proposes two additional ways in which the term 'mobility' might be attached to prints. The first concerns how images in this medium depict movement, lending valence to left and right as 'from' and 'toward', while implying a progression across the horizontal plane. A second reapplication of the term 'mobility' considers how such images activate the mind of the viewer, stirring the imagination to move from the literal to the figurative realm, from the conceit of representation (this is what is happening in the image) to interpretation (this is where the image might permit me to go). To identify the pictorial triggers that give way to such thought is to attend to the vehicular quality of images, which transports the viewer to a temporal moment that is not the same as the one the scene initially stages.2