Ornament With Flower and Eight Wild Folk (1490/1500): Artwork and History

Ornament With Flower and Eight Wild Folk (1490/1500) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Israhel van Meckenem the Younger German, c. 1440/45-1503.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Ornament prints with mischievous tiny figures were in such demand in late-15th- and early-16th-century Europe that engravers like Israhel van Meckenem frequently borrowed imagery and entire compositions from other artists. The flower stalk that the naked wild men and women scale comes from a print by an earlier artist, the Master E. S. This print bears an inscription that translates to “The noble bees draw honey from the beautiful flower; from this one however, the frivolous vermin extract a stronger potion.” The ripe blossom thus symbolizes sexual consummation, and the print simultaneously tempts and warns the viewer about “the birds and bees.”

Object facts

• Title: Ornament With Flower and Eight Wild Folk
• Date: 1490/1500
• Artist attribution: Israhel van Meckenem the Younger German, c. 1440/45-1503
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving in black on cream laid paper
• Dimensions: 20.5 × 13.6 cm (8 1/8 × 5 3/8 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.855

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.