06 August 2018
- This tangent is linked from:
- · Shrew 1: My Household Stuff (06 August 2018)
Around 1525, a German artist named Anton Woensam created this image of a woman, which Cornelis Theunissen used later as the model for his woodcut of the Dutch couple shown in the main post.
Some model.
Click on the image to enlarge it. It’s a big file, but I wanted to be sure you could read the words.
I photoshopped the English annotations in place of Woensam’s German. I had help with the translations (okay, I had a lot of help). The rhymes are gone, but at least you can read the things.
Woensam’s broadsheet calls this hapless soul ein weyse Frawen, ‘a wise woman’. As a sometime translator I would suggest ‘an ideal wife’ instead. It’s less literal, but it more accurately signifies the ethos of the artist and his like-minded Brüder. Also, speaking Platonically, we know that ideals are not obtainable in the real world.
- • The Wise Woman – The Gendered Ideal of Marital Virtue (c.1525)
- · original image with German annotations, English description
- · annotations text in English, same English description
- · From German History in Documents and Images [ghi-dc.org]
VERO NIHIL VERIUS