The Garden of Love (Large Plate) (c. 1465): Art, History and Details

The Garden of Love (Large Plate) (c. 1465) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master ES (German, active 1450–67).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: The Garden of Love (Large Plate)
• Date: c. 1465
• Creator attribution: Master ES (German, active 1450–67)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Dimensions: 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.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1993.161

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Husband, Timothy. The Medieval Housebook & the Art of Illustration. New York: Frick Collection, 1999.
• "1993 Annual Report." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 6 (1994): 143-218.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.