Cow wearing glasses in Vienna
Date:
Early sixteenth century
Location or Findspot (Modern-Day Country):
Austria
Description:
Textual sources reveal that many medieval houses were decorated with wall paintings both inside and out. The facade of one merchant’s house in Vienna had scenes of rabbits engaged in human activities on the exterior. A different house in Vienna preserves a single intriguing scene: a wolf and a cow, the latter wearing spectacles, engaged in a game of backgammon while a man in the background wields a flyswatter. An eighteenth-century description of the frescoed
facade recorded the surviving inscriptions, which stated that the animals are betting their skins on the outcome; the man in the background, a furrier, is awaiting the result of the game. This could be a moralizing tale, or it may simply be one of the entertaining marginalia so popular in medieval painting and sculpture. Eyeglasses were in use by the late thirteenth century; backgammon is an ancient game. The house and the painting date to the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Relevant Textbook Chapter(s):
11
Image Credits:
Linda Safran
Tags:
Western European,
Status and identity,
Animals,
Games
