Stag hunting with crossbows and dogs, large miniature on a leaf from an illuminated album amicorum, manuscript on paper [southern Germany (perhaps Tübingen), mid-sixteenth century (before 1561)]

a leaf, 187mm. by 130mm., with a scene of noblemen and a woman in a boat in a river, a dead wild-boar at the feet of the foremost man, as another man on horseback blows a hunting horn and uses dogs to flush out deer from the woods into the water, three deer in the water swimming away from two dogs as the hunters in the boat take aim at them with large crossbows, panel for inscription with orange frame 80mm. by 60mm., with inscription entered at Tubingen in 1561 mentioning Joannis Reuscher from Leipzig, with an ornamental coat-of-arms of a griffon sable on argent, on verso: a number of inscriptions in Greek, German and Latin in cursive and humanist hands (one dated 1609), some small spots and losses to edges of leaf on left and bottom, else good condition, framed

Scenes such as these are rare witnesses to hunting practices in the late Middle Ages, and those here with the driving of the deer into the water where they were slower moving targets for the hunters echo both the boar-hunt in a fifteenth-century copy of Gaston Phoebus, Book of the Hunt (BnF. fr.616, fol.117r) and Lucas Cranach the Elder's, The Stag Hunt of the Elector Frederick the Wise (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), painted in 1544.