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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 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…