ABSTRACT
The interrelationship of history and the visual arts should not be taken for granted. The visual arts have laws and traditions of their own and require a distinct interpretative methodology. Just like in literature, a great many themes are rooted in tradition or based on topoi, which often reduces the usefulness of the arts as historical source material. Nevertheless, clichés and traditional iconography may also provide information about the ideas and views in a particular culture.1 In particular, Netherlands prints from the early modern period, combining text and image, are an attractive didactic vehicle for the expression or propagation of ideas, norms and values. They are often accompanied by lengthy explanatory poems or texts, mainly in Latin, and the medium enjoyed relatively widespread distribution among the literate ranks of society. The kinds of images employed – personifications and allegories – were well suited to depicting edifying messages; they were also favoured stylistic devices in the rhetoricians’ literature, another art form produced by and for the burghers. In the case under consideration, perceptions of labour, research of prints and the related textual material may therefore provide a useful contribution to cultural history, or rather, to the history of mentalities. All the prints under discussion were created in Haarlem or Antwerp, the two centres of print production in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century.
