11-20-2022, 07:16 PM
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A fortuitous find in a rather shabby quarto of British antiquities, in the middle of the section dealing with heraldry, there was this curious ink drawing in a naive but very hermetic style: a cartouche representing Perseus delivering Andromeda, and another in which Diana at the bath, in the light of the moon's rays, changes Actaeon into a stag. Most intriguing are the epigrams and mottos that frame them: they are written backwards. Was the drawing a model for an engraver (the engraving, detached from the copper plate, would show the text right side up)?
Anyone can read this? Someone pointed that the crabbed handwriting was either Old Dutch or possibly Flemish. I paste them below inverted, that is, with the text now legible.
A fortuitous find in a rather shabby quarto of British antiquities, in the middle of the section dealing with heraldry, there was this curious ink drawing in a naive but very hermetic style: a cartouche representing Perseus delivering Andromeda, and another in which Diana at the bath, in the light of the moon's rays, changes Actaeon into a stag. Most intriguing are the epigrams and mottos that frame them: they are written backwards. Was the drawing a model for an engraver (the engraving, detached from the copper plate, would show the text right side up)?
Anyone can read this? Someone pointed that the crabbed handwriting was either Old Dutch or possibly Flemish. I paste them below inverted, that is, with the text now legible.