June 1, 2010, Filed Under: Art, Digital CollectionsEuropean popular imagery collection now accessible online Spanning the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Ransom Center’s European popular imagery collection is now fully accessible online via two sources: the Center’s finding aid and ARTstor’s nonprofit digital library. The Ransom Center’s online finding aid includes descriptive text derived from collector’s notes and a lengthy subject index. Each record in the finding aid also includes a link to the related image. ARTstor’s digital library provides advanced search functions and the ability to group selected images for PowerPoint display in classrooms, with images at high resolution. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the resultant cultural phenomenon called “Popular Imagery” is a perfect example of cause and effect. Like printed words, unlimited reproductions of images helped bring about the development of a new visual language in early European society and a burgeoning cultural renaissance. The broad scope of the collection, whose origins include nine European countries, illustrate this fact. Prints make up the bulk of the popular imagery collection, with 686 intaglios (including 17 mezzotints), 115 woodcuts, one wood engraving, and six lithographs. Researchers will find an abundance of subjects, from political satire on kings, rulers, revolution, and war to social satire on gender, marriage, and domestic life; from religious studies and their allegorical themes on vice and virtue to numerous motifs on “The Ages of Man,” and “The Dance Macabre” or “Dance of Death.” Great moments in science and technology are visually well-represented in the collection, as are entertaining designs for buildings, board games, and signs of the Zodiac. While some of the works in this collection were created anonymously—often to protect the creator from ridicule, incarceration, or worse—the collection also includes imagery by many significant artists of the time period, including Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Hans Holbein (1497–1543) and Lucas Cranach, the Younger (1515–1586). Please click the thumbnails to view full-size images. Battista Parmensis (Italian, b. 1541) Il mondo alla riversa (The world in reverse), 1585. Engraving. Scenes of role reversal with Italian rhymes, including an armed woman watching her husband spinning wool, a king walking behind a peasant riding a horse, an ox guiding a plough drawn by 2 peasants, a child interrogating 3 professors, a fish catching a bird, a donkey washing a man’s head, a goat playing a lute, etc. Unidentified (German). Patiens cornuta mulier. Die geduldige Hanreyin. (The patient cuckolded woman), 17th century. Engraving and etching. Satire on the cuckolded woman who married a much younger husband, with verses in Latin and German. An old woman, with horns growing out of her head, rides on a huge rooster. In the background to the left, her husband is wooing a younger woman, and to the right he is beating his complaining wife. Unidentified (German). Untitled [Satire on men’s fashion], Late 17th century. Engraving and etching. Satirical broadside on imported men’s fashions. Two dandies in elaborate costumes are shown shaking hands. Behind them, a bearded angel with a hourglass on his head is about to cut them down with his scythe. Unidentified (Italian). Il nuovo giuoco dell’oca (The new game of the goose), early 18th century. Hand-colored woodcut with letterpress. Board games, originating primarily among the upper classes, were gradually assimilated by the rest of society. This broadside has changed very little from earlier publications of this popular game. However, here the central figure, which in a similar 1650 version of the game consisted of an elegantly dressed, upper-middle class couple with their children, has given way to a grotesque dwarf riding a goose and brandishing a sword in one hand and a doomed bird in the other. The fact that this figure in the center has replaced the upper-class couple is indicative of the social change this game has undergone. Unidentified (French). Le Fameux Lustucru, Seul et unique dans son genre pour repolir les têtes des femmes etc. (The famous Lustucru. Unique in his profession of refashioning wives’ heads), ca 1797. Hand-colored etching. The name “Lustucru” is probably a pun on the the phrase “l’eus-tu-cru?” or “would you have believed it?” The brightly colored etching shows him and his son in their workshop in Madagascar, hard at work refashioning the heads of itinerant women or wives, correcting their faults and making them prettier. Gaspar Huberti (Belgian, 1619-1684). Untitled [The fight for the man’s pants]. Hand-colored engraving. The eternal topic of the struggle for power between and among the sexes, and the question “who wears the pants” is one that provides occasion for humor as well as serious tensions.
