The Bewitched Groom By Albrecht Durer

In 1522, Albrecht Dürer made a claim regarding the ultimate goal in art to be “simplicity” which is the “native countenance of nature.” The ‘nature’ he refers to is the natural state of the subject he is depicting without the fanciful dress or any artistic complications or additions. That is to say, ‘nature’ is the forms of God’s work sans the corruption of the profane. This is perhaps most well-illustrated in the self-portraits that Dürer paints in 1500 and draws in 1522. With the gap of twenty-two years between the two self-portraits, it is insinuated that his change of heart is due to his old age. The 1500 self-portrait (fig.1) depicts Dürer aged twenty-eight, dressed in a rich brown fur coat and his hair is clearly styled. The self-portrait’s
The 1544 single-leaf woodcut of The Bewitched Groom (fig. 5) shows again, a trinity of three figures. In the foreground, a foreshortened man is lying on top of a pitchfork face up and his feet hanging off the ledge. In his hand is a befallen currycomb. Behind him, standing at the doorway and with his back towards us but head turned to glare angrily at the viewer is a horse. On the right side of the woodcut, peering in through a window with her left breast exposed and holding a burning torch is presumably a witch or a hag. The composition seems to implicate that the victim’s misfortune was in some way influenced by the woman in the window, whether it is the suggestion that she killed, entranced, or entranced the horse to kick, the connotation is obvious. The connection also implies a sense of interchangeability between the woman and the horse as suggested by Dale Hoak which aids in his thesis that perhaps this was an illustration about Baldung’s sexual transgression that “Like the Hexenbilder generally, the Bewitched Groom confirms Baldung's obsession with the sexual manifestations of sorcery.” However, while this suggests Baldung’s exploration of the innate human nature of sexual fantasy through the depiction of witchcraft, the iconology in the image also stands to suggest other characteristics or aspects of human