December 2025 (3)

A peculiarly German motif — in both senses of the word! Presumably a sexual innuendo — riding on pricks? (works just as well in German) Christoph Gasser is bout to publish an article on this popular album motif. The earliest example known to me is one of the supporters of the arms of Christoph Soll painted on the wall of the Bruneck drinking cellar which is dated 1526; there is then a gap of some four decades before a single example in glass-painting of 1568, contemporary with the earliest examples in the alba amicorum, whereafter it is taken up enthusiastically (I have records of 13 others) — and often as the supporter of a coat-of-arms — though curiously seems never to have made it into the print-book repertoire. There is, however, a single-sheet of the motif engraved by Mattheus Greuter and issued by Johann Bussemacher in Cologne in 1588 captioned with both what was evidently the traditional German rhyme (see below) and a Latin couplet which I translate: “My shameful wantonness set me on the hedgehog. Now I suffer the rough prickles which I deserved”. Like other such erotic motifs it may be found on playing-cards and in other media, including a ceramic figurine made by Christoph Gandtner in the 1590s, and even as a decoration painted on a sleigh. In this last example the naked rider plays a lute and is accompanied by the letters D M F W D I A D I S which like so many of the similar abbreviated sentences found in the albums might have remained mysterious but for the fact that it is often spelled out in full in the albums and elsewhere: Das Macht Fur Witz / Das Ich Auf Dem Igel Sitz [My forwardness/ impertinence make me sit on the hedgehog] — it is not clear to me quite what this means! Vorwitz (numerous spellings in earlier German!) also means inquisitiveness as well as forwardness, cheekiness — is the idea one of punishment? punishing female curiosity, of the sort that proverbially killed the cat?

One of the latest appearances of the motif is as a design for one of the Coburg shooting targets for 1629 [BELOW].

The attributes carried by the rider are obviously significant, in the Jenisch album and on the playing-card she holds a mirror, but on one of the orphaned album leaves in the Frommann Collection (BELOW) she brandishes the suggestive foxtail [for the foxtail-through-woman’s-legs motif, SEE FUTURE POSTING]

Naked women also appear holding hedgehogs of more naturalistic size and in one case standing on a hedgehog — this hedgehog, painted on glass c.1585 (see below), is provided with a banderole reading Dritst du mich so stich ich dich [‘if you tread on me I will prick you’] — again (and not least because the woman is naked) one cannot but suspect some sexual innuendo.

ceramic statuette by Christoph Gardtner, 1590s. Vieena, Kunsthistorischers Museum

Non-Riders