"Do Not Eat Your Heart Out" [fol. 22 recto]

c. 1512/1515

French early 16th Century

Associated Names
French early 16th Century

Artist

This is a drawing of a scene with five people, each with a banner near them. One of the people stands in the center, with the others gathered around them. The central figure wears a hat and cape, with a corset-like garment around their waist. There is a rope tied around their throat, the end held by a person in the top left, and another person in the top right holds a hood with long ears above the central person. In the bottom right, a person uses long pilers to remove or insert a bright red heart from the chest of the central person, which has a large red gash. A person on the bottom left dressed like a nun holds up a long sword near the central person. Each of these people has pale skin, and they are dressed differently. They each have banners near them, perhaps identifying them. The red of the heart and the black of the nun's clothes are the only color, and the background is off-white paper.

Media Options

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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

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Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Sale, London, Sotheby's, 13 July 1937, lot 64); (sale, London, Sotheby's, 15-17 November 1937, lot 546); (sale, London, Maggs Bros., Ltd., catalogue 709, 1941, no. 30); (purchased by William H. Schab Gallery via Paul Graupe); purchased by Ian Woodner, New York, by 1973; by inheritance to his daughters, Andrea and Dian Woodner, New York, 1990.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1973

  • Woodner Collection II: Old Master Drawings from the XV to the XVIII Century, William H. Schab Gallery, New York and tour, 1973-74, no. 9.

Bibliography

1974

  • Butler, Joseph T. "Old Master Drawings from the Woodner Collection II." Connoisseur 186 (1974): 56-57.

1983

  • Massing, Jean Michel. "The Influence of Erasmus: Text and image in a French pre-emblematic manuscript." Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing (Colloquium Paper at the Warburg Institute) 1983: 75-82.

1987

  • Massing, Jean Michel. "The Illustrations of Lucian's Imago Vitae Aulicae." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 50 (1987): 215-16.

1990

  • Massing, Jean Michel. Du texte à l'image. La Calomnie d'Apelle et son iconographie. Strasbourg, 1990: 48, 67, 81, 93, 284-285, no. 8A, pl. 8A.

1994

  • Colenbrander, H.Th. "Een serie tekeningen naar Erasmus' Adagia: Jean Perréal, de Maître aux Pieds-Bots en de Meester van de Legende van de H. Egidius." in Boeken in de late Middeleeuwen. Hermans and van der Hoek, eds. Groningen, 1994: 211-220.

1995

  • Massing, Jean Michel. Erasmian Wit and Proverbial Wisdom. An Illustrated Moral Compendium for François 1er. Unpublished manuscript, 1994.

Inscriptions

across top in pen and brown ink: CuriaLis / SoLicitudo; across bottom in pen and brown ink: ABVSVS / Prudentia. / Cura.; lengthy notation verso

Wikidata ID

Q64570823

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