ABSTRACT
Many young women, especially from the lower classes, were deeply affected by the violence and plunder of war during the early modern period. The two most important Swiss artists during this period, Urs Graf and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, who both served as mercenary soldiers in numerous campaigns, created drawings that reflected their experiences and expressed their ambivalence about both war and its victims. As the drawings of harlots and camp followers discussed in this essay show, the young women caught up in warfare around 1520 bore the desecrations of war in their disrupted lives and damaged bodies. In his drawings, Urs Graf expresses highly ambivalent feelings of both fear and lust toward them.
