Satan zaait onkruid tussen het graan 1579 - 1585

Curator: Pieter Jalhea Furnius gave us this piece, “Satan zaait onkruid tussen het graan,” sometime between 1579 and 1585. Editor: It's almost like a scene caught between sleep and nightmare, isn't it? All these languid bodies scattered about and then this figure...Satan, I presume?... so vividly poised for disruption. Curator: Yes, Furnius definitely leans into the drama here. The figures are characteristic of the Mannerist style with those elongated forms. I'm interested in the engraving medium. What does that choice offer the viewer, do you think? Editor: The fine lines emphasize precision and detail but it also suggests a mass producibility—these ideas could be disseminated broadly, impacting the very social fabric it depicts. Curator: That’s fascinating when you consider the image's message—a cautionary tale. It illustrates a biblical parable about the enemy sowing weeds among the wheat, but applied perhaps to contemporary religious and political strife. Editor: And how apt that this message would be produced through an image and process reproducible in mass quantities. Who had the means to commission, produce, and circulate these? What does that process tells us about access to the means of both agricultural and ideological production at this time? Curator: A clever interpretation! Consider those sleepers: oblivious, vulnerable. It certainly underscores the theme. Editor: There's something unsettling in the contrast between the naturalism in those sleeping figures and the exaggerated gesture of Satan. He embodies pure artifice—a made thing in himself. Curator: Indeed. It creates a certain… unease. Perhaps this piece asks if we are all too ready to be unaware. A pointed statement that whispers through centuries. Editor: And the medium carries its own historical baggage too. The lines are deeply cut, and each print carries within it that embodied labor that shaped and reproduced it. That itself seems worthy of a close and considered study, both artistically and culturally.