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Forget industry — the “busy bee” — for the moment; the bee also features in emblematic contrasts: the contrast between the sweetness of the bee’s honey and the sharpness of its sting; and the contrast of the bee and spider that (in medieval and early modern belief) make opposite products from the same flower (honey…
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as intellectuals have long liked to believe. The appearance of the forceful encounter of the representatives of both sides of the proposition was fixed in 1608, with the publication of thePugillus Facetiarum print-book: The miniature in the Freund album, for example, dated 1617, shows its dependence on the print-book plate (above) in such telltale details…
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This, at first sight, comical painting of a man feeding an ass at the dining-table is soon revealed to be an allegory, when we notice the labels — Caro [Flesh] for the ass, Homo Carnalis [Carnal Man] for the man feeding him, and Anima [Soul] for the skinny, dishevelled figure hovering behind him. The caption…
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One of the most popular episodes — frequently depicted — from Ariosto’s epic, Orlando Furioso (first full edition published 1532), shows the lovers Angelica and Medoro carving their names on a tree (and sometimes suggested as the source of Shakespeare’s Orlando carving his beloved Rosalind’s name on every tree in the Forest of Arden). It…
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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…
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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,…
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The plate below appears in Peter Rollos’ Vita Corneliana, published in Berlin in 1624 (dated copy in Berlin ….) 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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…