A riotous musical concert is the subject of a full-page miniature in the album of Andreas Matt, dared entries 1597-1606. The principal instrument, however, is a piano from which five animal heads — belonging to four cats and a dog — project, which screech when the particular key to which they are attached is struck!…

A surreal motif, which — famous for my gravitas — I only give house-room here, as today I found a second example. The Huber album example painted in the 1620s is ironically captioned — the bagpipe is not usually considered to sound sweetly [dulce] — with a well-known line from one of the popular medieval…

On the cover of the only English-language work to discuss early modern alba amicorum to date, June Schlueter’s much-needed The Album Amicorum and the London of Shakespeare’s Time (London 2011), we see a group of figures on horseback and on foot, which the author plausibly identifies as a company of travelling players: It is clear…

The album amicorum originated in the desire to commemorate one’s fellow students, one’s university friends — and professors — in mid-16C Wittenberg. As soon as it became customary to include drawn and painted devices and miniatures, every album contained such schematic visual emblems of friendship, Lat. amicitia. Friends, in this context — certainly throughout the…

I have yet to come across this amusing scene painted in an album, but evidently it was — and, interestingly, as early as 1607. The above listing is but one of the hundreds describing orphaned leaves auctioned by Weigel in Leipzig in 1864 in the du Rosey sale. It probably looked much like this plate…

The old story — young wife makes fool of old husband (note fool’s cap), even effeminates him, as he is forced to participate in that quintessentially feminine occupation, spinning! This miniature in the Lüdel album, painted c.1624 is accompanied by a traditional rhyme Ejn harte nuß, ein stumpfer Zan, Ein jungeß Weib, ein alter Man,…

Glad to have the excuse of the Meyer album miniature, painted in Switzerland c.1640 (below), to post the Swiss painted glass panes of this (& other) motifs The elderly, book-under-his-arm, know-all (?teacher, scholar) says to the boy who has fallen from the ladder: Werestu nit so hoch gestigen Vnd werest bey deinsgleichen bliben Vnd hetest…

Distel und Dorn stechen sehr Falsche Zungen noch viel mehr. Auch wolt ich lieber in Disteln und Dornen baden Denn mit falschen Zungen seyn beladen. [Thistle and thorn prick badly / false tongues much more / And yet I’d rather bathe in thistles / than be burdened by false tongues]. The Keils noted that in…

As the overwhelming majority of albums were begun when their owners were students, this is not surprisingly one of the most popular motifs to be found in them. Cornelius bin ich genant           [My name’s Cornelius                               Allen Studenten wolbekant       well known to all students] So runs the caption to what was to become the…

Of the numerous memento mori emblems in the albums this is surely the strangest. The sketch in the album of Jacob Freund is a particularly unlikely version: Two men in robes emerge from an arcade to witness an eagle dropping a tortoise on the head of a seated man who appears to be declaiming from…