This is a motif which appears to me to evolve from an original model depicting the Three Estates, via the addition of Death (with — inevitably — incidental shades of the Danse Macabre). By the late 16C it is sometimes an incremental motif in which each ‘estate’ declares its service to ALL the preceding ones,…
This emblematic design seems to have first appeared in the early 17C, and like many other images popular with the album painters its representation divides into two phases, before and after it appears in a print-book, in this case the Speculum Cornelianum (von der Heyden, Strasbourg 1618). I consider this volume to be the 2nd…
This is the (?Germanic) motif of the head-on-legs surmounted by a long-necked bird’s head which bends down to bite the nose of the (human) head. Weirdsville! The naming of the nose is important in the German verbal idiom, sich an die eigenen Nase fassen [to grasp oneself by the nose/to tweak one’s own nose]. In…
The particular rebus in which we are interested here I have noted in four albums to date, those of Hans Renner (1607), Michael Van Meer (1613-48), Christoph Felber (1645) and Jakob von Zinnenburg (1620-33). In the von Zinnenburg painting — the first image below — we see a man and woman in the foreground, posed…
This is but one of the numerous pictorial album motifs (in these young men’s albums) devoted to young women. I hope to exemplify other, less hostile triadic groupings in a future post. [I did! see now https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/triads-of-one-kind-and-another/ ] So… The Three Proudest are: the Peacock (ok — we’re used to that one of old), the…
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…
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…
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”,…
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…
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…