“ (…) the monument seems to be the overpowering commemoration not of victory but a vicious betrayal. The life-sustaining fruits of peasant` labour are depicted in scrupulous detail… There, on the top of it all, the peasant sits, alone hunched over, unarmed, stabbed in the back… there is no image of threat, so there seems to be no image of triumph. Instead the column itself suggests that the killer was standing above as well as behind him, in other words, that the victim was struck treacherously while sitting – resting, perhaps after his labour. (…) but precisely here, at the moment we begin to flesh out the historical situation, that our understanding of Dürer`s sketch begins to encounter obstacles… there are no comparable indications of solidarity, overt or couvert, elsewhere in Dürer`s art or writings. “Dürer never wavered for a moment in his loyalty to Luther,” Panofsky claims… “There is no place for patience or mercy. This is the time of the sword, not the day of grace”, [as Luther wrote in his pamphlet, ‘Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants’, in 1525].  If Dürer`s design was concieved in the spirit of Luther`s remarks,… then the artist did not intend to represent the betrayal of the peasants. On the contrary, we may say that the monument actually participates in the betrayal. The bitter irony we initially perceived was constituted less by concrete evidence of Dürer`s subversiveness than by our own sympathy for the peasants, sympathy conditioned by our century`s ideology, by recent historical scholarship, and, no doubt above all, by our safe distance from the fear and loathing of 1525.”