Hans Baldung Grien

1484/5 - 1545 • German • Painter/Printmaker • Northern Renaissance

"[In I544] Baldung created his final and most monumental expression of the vanquished artistic self Produced ... the year before the artist's death, and subverting all those sceJ1es of origin with which Albrecht Durer prefaced his oeuvre, Baldung's Bewitched Stable Groom woodcut stands as a fitting end page to the brief moment of self-portraiture in German Renaissance art." - Joseph Koerner, 1993

Baldung is believed to have entered DURER's Nuremberg WORKSHOP by 1503. After a few years he settled in Strasbourg, where he spent most of his life. He was interested in the occult, and there is a strong vein of perverse eroticism in much of his work. It has been suggested that Baldung's intention was to overthrow the ideas of Durer. Bal dung's dark-toned woodcut Witches' Sabbath (1510) is set in a forest where both trees and witches are bare, and one witch rides backward on a flying goat. She carries a long pole with a forked end that supports a cauldron of brew. This same pitchforklike instrument reappears in one of Baldung's last PRINTS, an inexplicable image called The Bewitched Groom (1544), about which the historian Koerner writes above. The groom-a stable hand rather than a bridegroom-is flat on his back, radically foreshortened, his feet at the bottom edge of the picture and his head at the threshold of a stall where a horse looks over its shoulder at him. The groom has fallen on top of the double-duty hay pitchfork/ witch's broom. A cackling, grinning hag peers in through a window. As strange as any other part of the picture is the fact that Baldung's own coat of arms is on the wall, and the work is considered a self-portrait, as Koerner writes. The mystery of the image is tantalizing, but whatever hidden meaning it may have, it does reflect the fascination with the bizarre that permeated the era and was especially popular among Protestants as an alternative to conventional religious imagery.