Two Shields with a Hare and a Moor's Head, Held by a Wild Man (1480/90): Artwork and History

Two Shields with a Hare and a Moor's Head, Held by a Wild Man (1480/90) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Martin Schongauer German, c. 1430/50-1491.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Schongauer may have produced his ten heraldic shields in roundels as family crests for the middle classes rather than the nobility. The partially blank areas of the shields and the fanciful figures holding them suggest that the works were not exclusively made for families of high standing but could have been purchased individually and filled in with other family emblems to be used more widely. The depiction of this forest-dwelling wild man, wreathed in vines and clothed only in his own hair, alludes to a simpler time before the advent of civilization, when men were free to indulge all their appetites.

Object facts

• Title: Two Shields with a Hare and a Moor's Head, Held by a Wild Man
• Date: 1480/90
• Artist attribution: Martin Schongauer German, c. 1430/50-1491
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 7.8 × 7.8 cm (3 1/8 × 3 1/8 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.917

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.