Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
The Donkey Laden with Food, from Emblematic Figures of Animals
Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne (after Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (Flemish, c. 1520-1590))
1633
- Medium
- Engraving on ivory laid paper
- Classification
- Dimensions
- Plate: 27.3 × 20.5 cm (10 3/4 × 8 1/8 in.); Sheet: 27.4 × 20.7 cm (10 13/16 × 8 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- Flanders
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Prints of animals could be accurate and fanciful simultaneously. This finely engraved yet slightly caricatured scene from Aesop’s Fables depicts a donkey laden with fine food and wine who nonetheless happily gnaws at a prickly thistle instead. Moral interpretations of the text have ranged from “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” to a critique of stinginess. Though unsigned, this humorous image of feast and famine set off a chain of copies, ironically ending with a dozen Aesop roundels that decorated the back of trenchers, wooden plates used for the final fruit and nut course in England.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
