The Mole

Melchior Lorck presents The Mole in a carefully composed and articulated form, its compact body defined through firm, yet very delicate and controlled engraving, using short flicks of the burin and stipple work to model the shape and suggest the animal's fur. He did not however – unlike Wenceslaus Hollar almost exactly a century later – attempt to convey a sense of texture, of the softness and velvety darkness of the fur. The image does betray a sense of studied curiosity, characteristic of Renaissance interest in unusual or lesser-known creatures, yet places it in a wider context: the animal is shown in front of a fictitious scenery with a small stone column base in the foreground, a large tree trunk in the middle ground at right and, further in the distance, two watermills on the shore of a lake or river, with a hilly landscape beyond. Here we see a large church or cathedral in construction, with scaffolding all around, a fortified castle on a steep mountain and further to the left, on an adjacent hill, another large building under construction, possibly a monastery or abbey. Alison Wright situated the print within a broader tradition of early animal imagery and curiosity-driven printmaking and suggested that with this landscape Lorck was comparing human development in technological processes to the natural workings of animals. In this sense, the moles’ habit of digging tunnels and building hills finds an analogy in the building activities and hills depicted in the background. In any case, the minuscule landscape in the background lends the small animal a strange monumentality, to which the broken column base adds a certain classical grandeur.
It is a rare print and not present in some of the leading public collections.