Knight, Death and the Devil in the context of "Personifications of death"

Saint Jerome in His Study (German: Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus) is a copper engraving of 1514 by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. Saint Jerome is shown sitting behind his desk, engrossed in work. The table, on the corner of which is a cross, is typical of the Renaissance. An imaginary line from Jerome's head passing through the cross would arrive at the skull on the window ledge, as if contrasting death and the Resurrection. The lion in the foreground is part of the traditional iconography of St. Jerome, and near it is a sleeping dog, an animal found frequently in Dürer's works, symbolizing loyalty. Both creatures are part of Jerome's story in the Golden Legend (c. 1260), which contained fanciful hagiographies of saints.

St. Jerome in His Study is often considered as part of a group of three Dürer engravings (his Meisterstiche), the other two being the well-known Melencolia I (1514) and Knight, Death and the Devil (1513). Together they have been viewed as representing the three spheres of activity recognized in medieval times: Knight, Death, and the Devil belongs to the moral sphere and the "active life"; Melencolia I represents the intellectual; and St. Jerome the theological and contemplative life.

The White Knight is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass. He represents the chess piece of the same name. As imagined in John Tenniel's illustrations for the Alice stories, he is inspired by Albrecht Dürer's 1513 engraving "Knight, Death and the Devil."

The Meisterstiche ("master prints") by Dürer are three of his most famous engravings. They are Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Melencolia I (1514) and St. Jerome in His Study (1514). These three large prints (about 7 by 10 inches (18 by 25 cm)) are often grouped together because of their perceived quality and unity of meaning, although this latter is a matter of scholarly dispute.

Art historian Erwin Panofsky has described them as showing meticulous care in execution and also having complexity and significance in terms of iconography. Panofsky, while recognising that these are Durer's "most famous engravings" and are "not unjustly, known as his 'Meisterstiche'", notes that they "have no appreciable compositional relationship with one another" and should not, in any technical sense, be "considered as 'companion pieces'". They do, Panofsky argues, form "a spiritual unity". Here, Panofsky refers to Friedrich Lippmann's noticing of the scholastic classification of the virtues they represent: the moral, the theological and the intellectual. The Knight showing "the life of the Christian in the practical world of decision and action"; St. Jerome showing "the life of the Saint in the spiritual world of sacred contemplation"; and Melencolia I showing the "life of the secular genius in the rational and imaginative worlds of science and art".