January, or more generally – the beginning of a New Year – is the time when I want to talk about medieval calendars, or wider: about various ideas of visualising passing of time, often interlaced with astrological subjects. I have once written about depictions of two-faced god Janus, after whom…
Lascivious “Lascivie”
[This post is unsuitable for Readers under 18 years old.] Some time ago I have written about the 16th-century erotic prints (post available HERE) depicting various sexual positions. In that text I referred to the cycle by Agostino Carracci, which survived only in later copies. Today I would like…
Indecent old print
[This post is unsuitable for underage readers] During calligraphy workshops called ABC of a Scribe (run in Atelier Landowska & Bodziony in Cracow) I have lectures on medieval paleography (about scripts) and codicology (about books). The last lecture of this series gets to the issue of incunabula and Early Modern…
Temptation in short dress
In 2003 a group of wooden churches in Lesser Poland has been inscribed into UNESCO World Heritage List, and among them was also a church of St Michael Archangel in Binarowa. The church in its present form has been built at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, and…
A way to scare away the devil
There are various stories present in the European folklore telling how women are capable of defeating even the satan himself. A popular tale about the devil getting married and subsequently running away from his horrible wife was used in the sixteenth century by Niccolò Machiavelli in his novella “Belfagor arcidiavolo”;…