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Lot Essay
The present print is one from a series of six large woodcuts, together known as ‘The Large Power of Women’, all of which are very rare and are considered a high-point of Leyden's graphic oeuvre. (See also the previous lot.) The series cannot be dated with certainty, but it is generally agreed that they were created during the first half of 1510s, as they borrow elements from Lucas’s engraved Joseph series of 1512 and seem to anticipate elements of his engravings of 1513-14.
The woodblocks may have been cut by Lucas himself, and while the six prints do not appear to have been published together, they clearly form a series unified by theme, format, style, and mood. The theme is the power of women over men - in biblical texts, history and mythology - a subject that recurs in many of the artist's works, both in painting and print (see also lot 64).
The power of women must have been an established topic of literary and artistic expression as well as of popular culture in Northern Europe at the time. In his Chronique de Metz Philippe de Vigneulles (1471-1522) describes a parade held in Metz in 1511 in which the very same six subjects selected by Lucas for his set of woodcuts were represented by floats. Since the middle of the 15th century, a number of German printmakers had produced variations on the theme, beginning with the Master ES, the Master of the Housebook and the Master MZ, and continuing in the first half of the 16th century with Baldung, Cranach and Burgkmair. The woodcuts of the latter three, in particular, seem to have provided the main inspiration for the Dutch artist, as did in a more formal way Dürer's large woodcut series of the Apocalypse and the Passion of Christ.
Lucas’s depiction of these scenes is however quite distinctive from the preceding examples: the atmosphere pervading the scenes is quiet and pensive, sober yet with a ‘hint of corruption’, suffused with an air of cold cynicism. The figures, almost devoid of emotion, assume a plastic, theatrical pose and create an ‘immediate expressive effect as a tableau vivant’.
In the scene depicted here, the poet Virgil is seen hanging in a basket in the upper part of the scene, capturing the eyes of all the onlookers in the foreground. He had fallen in love with the Emperor’s daughter who, to punish his impudence, promised to raise him to her bedroom in a basket but left him dangling on the outside of the palace, thus exposing him to the public ridicule and humiliation.
The present sheet bears a Jug watermark (Hollstein 5), dated to around 1517, identifying this as an early impression.
E. S. Jacobowitz, S. L. Stepanek, The Prints of Lucas van Leyden and his Contemporaries, Washington, D.C., 1983, p. 102-123.
The woodblocks may have been cut by Lucas himself, and while the six prints do not appear to have been published together, they clearly form a series unified by theme, format, style, and mood. The theme is the power of women over men - in biblical texts, history and mythology - a subject that recurs in many of the artist's works, both in painting and print (see also lot 64).
The power of women must have been an established topic of literary and artistic expression as well as of popular culture in Northern Europe at the time. In his Chronique de Metz Philippe de Vigneulles (1471-1522) describes a parade held in Metz in 1511 in which the very same six subjects selected by Lucas for his set of woodcuts were represented by floats. Since the middle of the 15th century, a number of German printmakers had produced variations on the theme, beginning with the Master ES, the Master of the Housebook and the Master MZ, and continuing in the first half of the 16th century with Baldung, Cranach and Burgkmair. The woodcuts of the latter three, in particular, seem to have provided the main inspiration for the Dutch artist, as did in a more formal way Dürer's large woodcut series of the Apocalypse and the Passion of Christ.
Lucas’s depiction of these scenes is however quite distinctive from the preceding examples: the atmosphere pervading the scenes is quiet and pensive, sober yet with a ‘hint of corruption’, suffused with an air of cold cynicism. The figures, almost devoid of emotion, assume a plastic, theatrical pose and create an ‘immediate expressive effect as a tableau vivant’.
In the scene depicted here, the poet Virgil is seen hanging in a basket in the upper part of the scene, capturing the eyes of all the onlookers in the foreground. He had fallen in love with the Emperor’s daughter who, to punish his impudence, promised to raise him to her bedroom in a basket but left him dangling on the outside of the palace, thus exposing him to the public ridicule and humiliation.
The present sheet bears a Jug watermark (Hollstein 5), dated to around 1517, identifying this as an early impression.
E. S. Jacobowitz, S. L. Stepanek, The Prints of Lucas van Leyden and his Contemporaries, Washington, D.C., 1983, p. 102-123.