1512
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Power of Women: The Poet Virgil Suspended in a Basket is a 1512 by Lucas van Leyden, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A man dangles in a basket halfway up a tower while a woman smirks from the window. Below, a crowd points and laughs. This is Virgil, the famous Roman poet, tricked by an emperor’s daughter. She promised to lift him to her room, then left him stuck. It’s part of a series about women outsmarting men—common in the 1500s. The scene feels like a joke, but it also shows how stories about clever women were told back then. To see more of these playful, sharp scenes, look up *subject: netherlands, 16th century*.
This woodcut is from a series depicting the power of women, a popular early 16th-century theme. The series highlights a woman’s capacity to use beauty, charm, and ruse to thwart even the cleverest men. Here, Van Leyden illustrated the cunning of the Roman emperor’s daughter. According to legend, the poet Virgil fell in love with the maiden, but she objected and punished him for his impudence. After promising to raise Virgil to her bedroom window in a basket, she left him hanging halfway. The printmaker omitted the emperor’s daughter from the scene but added the woman advising her son against…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Lucas van Leyden (1494 – 8 August 1533), was a Dutch painter and printmaker in engraving and woodcut. Lucas van Leyden was among the first Dutch exponents of genre painting and was a very accomplished engraver.
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