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Jost Amman was perhaps the inventor of the motif in 1579, but it was taken up and elaborated by the Monogrammist BKGF in 1590 [SEE ALSO my “Sieving the Suitors” post here] and then copied 6 years later by the de Brys in their enormously influential Emblemata Saecularia (1596, 1611), though I cannot find it…
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This mischievous motif seems to have originated in 16C Germany. The commonest type of this trick numeration shows 2 fools but is captioned “(now) there’s 3 of us” — making the viewer by his/her puzzled inquiry, the 3rd! In the albums to date I have noticed only “3” and “4” — but larger numbers are…
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From its earliest appearance in the Pugillus Facetiarum (Strasbourg, 1608,1618) the motif was taken up by the album amicorum painters and endured as an independent engraved sheet into the 18C Three young men try their luck at bowling for the first prize woman. The ladies declare themselves (?) (from left to right) “Rich and old”,…
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In 2021, together with Dana Jenei, I compiled a study of this motif including all examples known to me at that date: Dana Jenei & Malcolm Jones, “Woman and the men of the Four Elements” in ed. Dana Jenei, In Honorem Razvan Theodorescu (Bucharest, 2021), 190-204 [available here: https://www.academia.edu/49004926/Woman_and_the_men_of_the_Four_Elements] Its popularity in the albums is…
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Here people quite literally go through the world/globe. They may have to bend as in the earliest example here (the painting attributed to Patinir) or they may simply have grown old by the time they emerge as in the album amicorum examples. (Man with upright stick) MET RECHT SOVDIC GERNE DOER DE WERELT COMMEN [Upright…
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Because the caption verse includes the origins of her sexual parts, it is sometimes censored Some time in the early 1620s, Hans Ludwig Pfinzing von Henfenfeld pasted into his album a print which appears in some copies of Peter Rollos’ Philotheca Corneliana (Berlin, 1619, 1623). It depicts seven demure-looking ladies in their respective national costumes,…
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This is another of those scenes which surely presupposes a (lost) print or maybe woodcut illustration in a book? Is the subject from some chivalric Romance I should know? It looks decidedly old-fashioned by this date. Is it from Ariosto, perhaps? — cf. the verses from the French translation in the Erlenwein album example below.…
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Seemingly deriving from an early 16C neo-Latin epigram by Heinrich Solde [Henricius Cordus] of Brunswick, beginning Tres medicus facies habet [the doctor has three faces] this is in fact a satire on the patient not the physician! I first encountered it in the alba amicorum (4 below — one dated 1620, the rest 1630s). The…
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In Eisenhart’s Grundsatze der teutschen rechten in sprichwortern (Helmstedt, 1759) appears the apparent legal maxim, Studentengut ist zollfrei [student goods are duty-free], but appears with the variant gabenfrei in a poem published by Picander 30 years earlier — as in the form in the Harpprecht album below (1738). The joke here — in case it’s…
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Not perhaps the most politically correct motif, but for a few years in the second decade of the 17th century she was a celebrity, famous for being fat! (can we still use the F word?). She was married to a Strasbourg rope-maker [Seiler] — hence her name — and evidently popular enough to be the…