ABSTRACT
Sometime in the 1580s, the Dutch artist, Crispin de Passe, who was closely associated with the print industry in Antwerp and an inhabitant of Cologne from the late 1580s, engraved and published a print of the planetary god Saturn and his so-called ‘children’ (fig. 8.1). The print was one of a series of the seven planetary gods and their children, originally designed by the leading Antwerp artist, Martin de Vos, with whom de Passe worked on a number of projects at the time. The depiction of planetary gods as the parents of particular children on earth served to link certain groups in society – age groups, social classes, occupations, social and cultural activities – with particular planetary influences. 1 This was a common literary and iconographical schema in the late Middle Ages that gave expression to traditional homologies between the cosmic macrocosm and human microcosm. As well as being depicted in each of de Passe’s seven prints, the idea was also well expressed on the titlepage with which de Passe prefaced the whole series: an image of The Golden Chain, which represented the Platonic Chain of Being that linked the three-fold cosmos of supercelestial, celestial and elemental worlds. But the distinguishing mark of Crispin de Passe’s print was that among Saturn’s children he included two groups who had not commonly appeared in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of the genre, European witches and Amerindian cannibals.
