Artwork Page for The Garden of Love (Large Plate)

Details / Information for The Garden of Love (Large Plate)

The Garden of Love (Large Plate)

c. 1465

Master ES

(German, active 1450–67)
Culture
Germany
Medium
engraving
Measurements
Plate: 23.5 x 15.8 cm (9 1/4 x 6 1/4 in.); Sheet: 23.8 x 16.5 cm (9 3/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
John L. Severance Fund 1993.161
Catalogue raisonné
Lehrs 215
Public Domain
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Location
Not on view
Print

Description

Master ES’s action-packed scene presents a love garden before a landscape with knights playing jousting games. Love gardens were locales for displaying chaste love, but the behavior here, such as touching and wine drinking between couples at the table, indicates that their love is rather more physical. A traveling poet at the door brings musical enticements, and a man with a fool’s cap in the foreground signifies lust. The many birds throughout the scene refer to coupling, since “birding” was a euphemism for the sex act.
A vertically oriented engraving in black ink depicts a garden scene with people with light skin tones in period attire. Foregrounded, a man and woman dance near a drum and stone well, while another man enters a doorway. Behind a wooden fence, four people sit at a table. In the background, a castle crowns a rocky hill overlooking a town and riders in a distant field.

The Garden of Love (Large Plate)

c. 1465

Master ES

(German, active 1450–67)
Germany

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