An Ass Eating Thistles
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An Ass Eating Thistles
Developed by authors during Renaissance times, the story of an ass eating thistles was a late addition to collections of Aesop's Fables. Beginning as a condemnation of miserly behaviour, it eventually was taken to demonstrate how preferences differ. An image for misers Two Greek poems from the 2nd century CE seem to have contributed to the making of the modern fable. One is the four-line poem of Babrius about a fox who asks an ass how it can eat thorns with such a soft mouth, which is listed as 360 in the Perry Index. The other is a simile in a short poem by Lucian in the Greek Anthology (XI.397) in which he likens the behaviour of a miser to 'the life of mules, who often, carrying on their backs a heavy and precious load of gold, only eat hay'. Based on these, the Renaissance author Andrea Alciato created the image for misers in his ''Emblemata'' (1531). Below the picture of a loaded donkey that is stooping to eat a thistle he adds a Latin poem likening a rich man to an ass that, t ...
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Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century. The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages. However, the beginnings of the period – the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300 – overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages, conventionally da ...
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Joost Van Den Vondel
Joost van den Vondel (; 17 November 1587 – 5 February 1679) was a Dutch poet, writer and playwright. He is considered the most prominent Dutch poet and playwright of the 17th century. His plays are the ones from that period that are still most frequently performed, and his epic ''Joannes de Boetgezant'' (1662), on the life of John the Baptist, has been called the greatest Dutch epic. Vondel's theatrical works were regularly performed until the 1960s. The most visible was the annual performance, on New Year's Day from 1637 to 1968, of '' Gijsbrecht van Aemstel''. Vondel remained productive until a very old age. Several of his most notable plays like ' and ' were written after 1650, when he was already 65, and his final play ', written at the age of eighty, is considered one of his finest. Early life Vondel was born on 17 November 1587 on the Große Witschgasse in Cologne, Holy Roman Empire. His parents, Joost van den Vondel the Elder and Sara (née Kranen), were Mennonites of ...
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Fables
Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. A ... lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim (philosophy), maxim or saying. A fable differs from a parable in that the latter ''excludes'' animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech or other powers of humankind. Conversely, an animal tale specifically includes talking animals as characters. Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the New Testament, "" ("''mythos''") was r ...
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Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall (c. 1690 – 1752) was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables. Early career Samuel Croxall was born in Walton on Thames, where his father (also called Samuel) was vicar. He was educated at Eton and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1711 and entered holy orders. Soon after graduating he began to emerge as a political pamphleteer, taking the Whig side on the question of the Hanoverian succession. In 1713 he published ''An original canto of Spencer: design'd as part of his Faerie Queene, but never printed'', followed next year by ''Another original canto of Spencer''. Croxall's satirical target was the Tory politician of the day, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the choice of poetical model was also politically motivated. In 1706 the Whig turncoat Matthew Prior had used the Spenserian stanza in ''An Ode, Humbly to the Queen'' on the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession; a ...
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Francis Barlow (artist)
Francis Barlow (c. 1626 – 1704) was an English painter, etcher, and illustrator. He ranks among the most prolific book-illustrators and printmakers of the 17th century, working across several genres: natural history, hunting and recreation, politics, and decoration and design. Barlow is known as "the father of British sporting painting"; he was Britain's first wildlife painter, beginning a tradition that reached a high-point a century later, in the work of George Stubbs. He was furthermore a pioneer in the history of comics by creating ''A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot'' (c. 1682), a picture story about the life of Titus Oates and the Popish Plot, which is told in a series of illustrated sequences where the story is written underneath them and the characters depicted on those images use speech balloons to talk. While it is not the first example of its kind in history, it is one of the oldest which is signed. Life Barlow was born c. 1626 in Lincolns ...
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Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (; baptised 26 February 156430 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play ''Tamburlaine,'' modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his caterin ...
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Trencher (tableware)
A trencher (from Old French ''tranchier'' 'to cut') is a type of tableware, commonly used in medieval cuisine. A trencher was originally a flat round of (usually stale) bread used as a plate, upon which the food could be placed to eat. At the end of the meal, the trencher could be eaten with sauce, but could also be given as alms to the poor. Later the trencher evolved into a small plate of metal or wood, typically circular and completely flat, without the lip or raised edge of a plate. Trenchers of this type are still used, typically for serving food that does not involve liquid; for example, the cheeseboard. In language An individual salt dish or squat open salt cellar placed near a trencher was called a "trencher salt". A "trencherman" is a person devoted to eating and drinking, often to excess; one with a hearty appetite, a gourmand. A secondary use, generally archaic, is one who frequents another's table, in essence a pilferer of another's food. A "trencher-fed pack" is a ...
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Marcus Gheeraerts The Elder
Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Marc Gerard and Marcus Garret (c. 1520 – c. 1590) was a Flemish painter, draughtsman, print designer and etcher who was active in his native Flanders and in England. He practised in many genres, including portraits, religious paintings, landscapes and architectural themes. Marcus Gheeraerts (I)
at the
He designed heraldic designs and decorations for tombs. He is known for his creation of a print depicting a map of his native town Bruges and the illustrations for a Dutch-language publication recounting stories from

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Matthijs Bril
Matthijs Bril or Matthijs Bril the Younger (1550 – 8 June 1583) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman of landscapes A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the p .... He spent most of his active career in Rome where his drawings of ancient Roman sites played an important role in the development of topographical landscape art.Nicola Courtright. "Matthijs Bril." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 16 September 2016 He was also a painter of Capriccio (art), capricci (architectural fantasies), with typical rustic hills with a few ruins.Matthijs Bril
on Hadrianus
He died young and his younger brother Paul Bril, ...
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Sadeler Family
The Sadeler family were the largest, and probably the most successful of the dynasties of Flemish engravers that were dominant in Northern European printmaking in the later 16th and 17th centuries, as both artists and publishers. As with other dynasties such as the Wierixes and Van de Passe family, the style of family members is very similar, and their work often hard to tell apart in the absence of a signature or date, or evidence of location. Altogether at least ten Sadelers worked as engravers, in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Austria. Much of their best work was high quality reproductive prints of contemporary artists such as Bartholomeus Spranger (Aegidius II) or the Venetian Bassano family (Jan I and Rafael I), that were important in spreading the reputation and style of these artists. The family The Sadelers were descended from "chasers," engravers of armour, from Aalst. Jan de Saeyelleer or Sadeleer had three sons, all usually called "Sad ...
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Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two millennia. The presence of wit or sarcasm tends to distinguish non-poetic epigrams from aphorisms and adages, which tend to lack those qualities. Ancient Greek The Greek tradition of epigrams began as poems inscribed on votive offerings at sanctuariesincluding statues of athletesand on funerary monuments, for example "Go tell it to the Spartans, passersby...". These original epigrams did the same job as a short prose text might have done, but in verse. Epigram became a literary genre in the Hellenistic period, probably developing out of scholarly collections of inscriptional epigrams. Though modern epigrams are usually thought of as very short, Greek literary epigram was not always as short as later examples, and the divide between "ep ...
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Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more ...
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