?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
HANS BALDUNG GRIEN Group of Seven Horses.
Woodcut, 1534. 227x337 mm; 9x13⅜ inches, thread margins. Small coat-of-arms watermark. A brilliant, early impression of this extremely scarce woodcut with very strong contrasts and little to no sign of wear, consistent with the earliest impressions of this subject.
We have found approximately only 15 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where there is another impression of this woodcut, along with the two other subjects which form the series of three, "In 1534 Baldung [1484/85-1545] made three woodcuts of wild horses in a dark and dense forest, a subject unique to him that had neither precedent nor following. The prints are so idiosyncratic that they must have had strong personal meaning for him, then in about his fiftieth year. Even though the horses and their poses do not look entirely real, they are fascinating in their strangeness and intensity. This [a Group of Seven Horses] is the least overtly sexual of the three works, but it may be guessed that the stallions are fighting for possession of a mare.
In the equestrian monument or portrait, in both antiquity and the Renaissance, the horse was deemed a noble creature, a fitting mount for the ruler or leader being glorified, and both Leonardo da Vinci and [Albrecht] Dürer made plans for treatises on the ideal proportions of the horse. Also since antiquity, however, horses--both stallions and mares--were equally reputed to be extraordinarily lustful. Further, in Germanic folklore the horse was associated with evil forces often having to do with witchcraft. The larger subject of these woodcuts, with their violence and pent-up energy, is the power of forces beyond man's understanding or control, specifically the overwhelming strength of the carnal instinct. Bartsch 57; Hollstein 239; Mende 78.
