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 Distichs of Cato:

Fistula dulce canit, volucrem dum decipit auceps [the pipe sings sweetly, while the fowler beguiles the bird]

and from the recently-digitised album of Georg von Olnhausen in Heidelberg UB:

The second title above the miniature reads Der Scheffer von der Neustadt [the shepherd from Neustadt]. This same character playing the shepherd’s instrument par excellence, the bagpipe, is to be seen much earlier on a woodcut sheet by Barthel Beham issued c.1535 — only here he sits backwards on a horse which he has bridled by the tail!

The [Sieber, Festwerk ] ….

The bagpipe has always been regarded as a somewhat comical music instrument, not least, on account of its phallic suggestiveness [for more on this particular aspect, see my essay ….. in ed. K. Banks & ….. 2026 ]

These German images are not unique — I can point to two examples in 17C English print imagery in which it is a putto who rides on the bagpipe, like a toddler on a space-hopper! The earlier is a detail from Auditus in the set of Five Senses etched by Francis Cleyn and published in England in 1646:

and some time in the final quarter of the century this detail was added to William Sherwin’s copy of Saftleven’s etching of Hearing, also from a set of The Five Senses:

and there will be others I am unaware of.

Dresden