Wagenlied, pagina 5 1641

This is page five of ‘Wagenlied,’ made by Crispijn van de Passe the Younger, sometime in the first half of the 17th Century. The printing press enabled a relatively cheap means for distributing text, but this was a time before copyright, when printed matter was often produced for explicitly political purposes. The text here, written in Dutch, is full of satirical proverbs, many of which cast aspersions at women. As with political cartoons, the caricatures and exaggerations used here would likely have had a basis in social reality, even if they should not be taken as a literal representation of Dutch society at the time. This page might have been slipped into a larger bound collection, acting as a kind of samizdat, or it might have been distributed on its own as a form of political or social commentary. To understand it better, we would need to examine a range of sources: official publications and also unofficial or underground pamphlets that give a sense of the issues people were concerned about at the time. Only then can the meaning of art become clear.