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I would have said this was a rare Biblical scene — until I started looking into it! In fact, many bibles that have more than a few illustrations include this scene. I first came across this strange Biblical incident as engraved on Richard Haydocke’s monumental brass of Henry Airay in New College, Oxford (1616) [BELOW],…
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“What I tell you three times is true”, cried the Bellman in Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, and verbal and visual triads seem to be one of those cultural universals that are somehow innately satisfying. [We have already posted examples of The Three Proudest triad here https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/the-three-proudest-a-misogynist-triad/ so the present post will not repeat…
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Something of a ragbag, a miscellany! We have met with several pictorialised proverbs already in sundry other posts [Idleness is the Devil’s cushion — at witches, devils, etc, to name but one], but this will be an open-ended post to which I can add from time to time. Of course there are problems of definition,…
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I was prompted to write this post by ‘discovering’ the page reproduced below in the album of Thomas Wanderer, painted in 1629 — which I think must be unknown, even to German scholars! Two witches, one naked riding a goat, the other clothed riding a pitch-fork, fly to the summit of a hill (the Braunsberg,…
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I feel like something of an interloper here, in an area I regard as the preserve of M.A. Katritzky — still, we press on! Professor Katritzky has shown how important the evidence of the album miniatures is for understanding the history of the Italian popular theatre we know as the commedia dell’ arte, from her…
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[SEE also my post https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/the-additional-fool-that-would-be-you/ and the various posts that show women making fools of men (often so-costumed) in one way or another, e.g. tempting them into the eel-/lobster-pot, fishing for them, fowling for them, watching them flutter down from the dovecote, etc] We have already met several examples of what I call the ‘commentary’…
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πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα [The fox knows many small things, but the hedgehog one big thing] — thankyou, Archilochus! The omniscient Erasmus was familiar with the saying, rendering it as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum [The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing] in his Adagia, from 1500…
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This grotesque image of a human/animal hybrid is captioned in Latin, En seruum fidelem [Behold a faithful servant], and to date, is the only depiction I have noticed in the albums of the motif I refer to as The Trusty Servant. By this date, the image was well-known throughout Europe. In France, Gilbert Cousin attests…
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I know of only one example of this motif painted in the albums — and I have no image of it! That said, I think the motif is of sufficient intrinsic interest to post here as many examples ante 1650 as I am aware of. Always happy to be notified of others — in the…
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In this motif the Devil, or Cupid, or a human fowler uses a human decoy — in the same way the owl was traditionally used to catch small birds — to catch humans of the opposite sex. The wonderful panel painting attributed to the Master of the Frankfurt Altarpiece, that only came to light in…