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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…
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Given that the habit of keeping albums originated in the Protestant university of Wittenberg, alma mater to both Luther and Melanchthon, the imagery in them, where it concerned matters of religion, was always bound to be anti-Catholic, and often, specifically, anti-Papal. By the time non-heraldic paintings appear with any frequency in the albums, the tradition…
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As we have seen already, the albums abound in images of thinly-veiled erotic metaphors — here is another. To date I have noticed 5 such miniatures in the albums, only one of which certainly predates the appearance of the Philotheca Corneliana print-book in 1619 — and here the horseman’s target is a circular garland rather…
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We might say that the album amicorum was born out of the Reformation, and given that the overwhelming majority of albums were produced in a Protestant milieu, there is no shortage of anti-Catholic iconography, often virulent. Anti-Papal motifs are common enough, but perhaps the commonest such images accuse monks of improper relations with nuns and…
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The peregrinatio academica, given that it almost always brought students to Italy, was a precursor of the 18C Grand Tour, and if for the moment we can forget the inevitable attraction for these young men of the courtesans of Venice, famous throughout Europe, it introduced them to the monuments of Antiquity — and not just…