Das sey dein hund und federspil.
No. 159. The Wastefulness of Youth.
The next picture in the series, which is equally difficult to describe, is aimed against those who fail in attaining virtue or honour through sluggishness. Others follow, but I will only give one more example. It forms our cut No. 159, and appears, from the verses accompanying it, to be aimed against those who practice wastefulness in their youth, and thus become objects of pity and scorn in old age. Whatever may be the point of the allegory contained in the engraving, it is certainly far-fetched, and not very apparent.
This German-Flemish school of grotesque does not appear to have outlived the sixteenth century, or at least it had ceased to flourish in the century following. But the taste for the diablerie of the Temptation scenes passed into France and Italy, in which countries it assumed a much more refined character, though at the same time one equally grotesque and imaginative. These artists, too, returned to the original legend, and gave it forms of their own conception. Daniel Rabel, a French artist, who lived at the end of the sixteenth century, published a rather remarkable engraving of the “Temptation of St. Anthony,” in which the saint appears on the right of the picture, kneeling before a mound on which three demons are dancing. On the right hand of the saint stands a naked woman, sheltering herself with a parasol, and tempting the saint with her charms. The rest of the piece is filled with demons in a great variety of forms and postures. Another French artist, Nicholas Cochin, has left us two “Temptations of St. Anthony,” in rather spirited etching, of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. In the first, the saint is represented kneeling before a crucifix, surrounded by demons. The youthful and charming temptress is here dressed in the richest garments, and the highest style of fashion, and displays all her powers of seduction. The body of the picture is, as usual, occupied by multitudes of diabolical figures, in grotesque forms. In Cochin’s other picture of the Temptation of St. Anthony, the saint is represented as a hermit engaged in his prayers; the female figure of voluptuousness (voluptas) occupies the middle of the picture, and behind the saint is seen a witch with her besom.
No. 160. The Demon Tilter (Callot).
No. 161. Uneasy Riding (Callot).
But the artist who excelled in this subject at the period at which we now arrive, was the celebrated Jacques Callot, who was born at Nancy, in Brittany, in 1593, and died at Florence on the 24th of March, 1635, which, according to the old style of calculating, may mean March, 1636. Of Callot we shall have to speak in another chapter. He treated the subject of the Temptation of St. Anthony in two different plates, which are considered as ranking among the most remarkable of his works, and to which, in fact, he appears to have given much thought and attention. He is known, indeed, to have worked diligently at it. They resemble those of the older artists in the number of diabolical figures introduced into the picture, but they display an extraordinary vivid imagination in the forms, postures, physiognomies, and even the equipments, of the chimerical figures, all equally droll and burlesque, but which present an entire contrast to the more coarse and vulgar conceptions of the German-Flemish school. This difference will be understood best by an example. One of Callot’s demons is represented in our cut No. 160. Many of them are mounted on nondescript animals, of the most extraordinary demoniacal character, and such is the case of the demon in our cut, who is running a tilt at the saint with his tilting spear in his hand, and, to make more sure, his eyes well furnished with a pair of spectacles. In our next cut, No. 161, we give a second example of the figures in Callot’s peculiar diablerie. The demon in this case is riding very uneasily, and, in fact, seems in danger of being thrown. The steeds of both are of an anomalous character; the first is a sort of dragon-horse; the second a mixture of a lobster, a spider, and a craw-fish. Mariette, the art-collector and art-writer of the reign of Louis XV. as well as artist, considers this grotesque, or, as he calls it, “fantastic and comic character,” as almost necessary to the pictures of the Temptation of St. Anthony, which he treats as one of Callot’s especially serious subjects. “It was allowable,” he says, “to Callot, to give a flight to his imagination. The more his fictions were of the nature of dreams, the more they were fitted to what he had to express. For the demon intending to torment St. Anthony, it is to be supposed that he must have thought of all the forms most hideous, and most likely to strike terror.”