This monde renversé motif and proverbial idiom seems commoner in early Dutch in the form, paard in de wieg, and there are also several examples of its use as a house/shop-sign in the late 15C Netherlands. The assertion in Larwood & Hotten’s 19C History of Signboards that it was the sign of a brothel is based…

Head-in-hand, a melancholy-looking woman sits in a small boat pulled along a stream by two swans, observed by a hunter on the bank. The scene is copied — very closely, in the Jenisch album miniature — from the woodcut by Erhard Schoen illustrating a print issued in Nurnberg in 1534 with verses by Hans Sachs,…

The plate below appears in Peter Rollos’ Vita Corneliana, published in Berlin in 1624 The motif, entitled Viel wunder im Weinfaß, is found in the album of Hans Heintze, which I have not seen, and though it must therefore just pre-date the print-book (dated entries 1619-22), it is described as looking exactly like the above…

Here I consider various types of visual tricks and puzzles found in the albums. Riddles? Well, riddle — singular — really! But it’s an interesting one… Painted into the album of Georg Bernhard in 1574. The page in question is sadly rubbed, but the details are nevertheless recoverable. We see a man between two black-clad…

I had never noticed this ‘lady’ before — though I must have scanned this digitised album more than once — just goes to show. The moral — for me, who am uninterested in heraldry — is to stop fast-forwarding through the Wappen [coats-of-arms] and check the supporters or, indeed, any human being in the vicinity,…

Images of human beings divided vertically in half — a strikingly graphic means of suggesting, for example, 2 sides to a personality, or any binary opposition, living/dead, male/female, old/young/, fool/wise man, Catholic/Protestant, etc. — and one of the commonest images in the albums. Although found in the albums as early as 1560 (below), there can…

1. Wine is strong. 2. the King is stronger. 3. Woman is strongest. 4.Truth trumps all three! The formula derives from I Esdras, chapter 3. It is first found in profusely-illustrated late medieval bibles that do not consider Esdras non-canonical. See Ilja Veldman, “Who Is the Strongest? The Riddle of Esdras in Netherlandish Art” in…

This transparent motif was enormously popular, and is perhaps the commonest allegorical motif to be found in the albums. The typical form depicts a youth — often standing on a sphere — pulled on on side by a person (usually a young woman) holding a thread, and on the other by a person (usually a…

A fairly low-tech, supplementary amusement to be found in many albums is the painting which includes a liftable flap over some portion of the image, e.g. a woman’s skirts, and we have already noticed the small musician literally fiddling under the voluminous skirts of the famous Fat Woman of Strasbourg. In the example in the…

The comparison of a woman to a horse — however regrettable we may feel it today — was unexceptional, and unexceptionable, in the early modern era — at least, in the ‘Germanic’ world. These two also make up two thirds of the triad we have considered in my post https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/triads-of-one-kind-and-another/ I first gave serious consideration…