15. Monogrammist CP
(ca. 1500-ca. 1550)

Dido

(click on image to print)
Monogrammist CP : Dido

Dido

Engraving, 95 x 65 mm., Bartsch 85 (as Georg Pencz), Landau 154 (as anonymous CP). A brilliant impression on laid paper, trimmed on the platemark which is visible in places on all four sides; tiny surface nick at the lower right. Dido is shown as a nude standing figure, alone in her bedroom, about to stab herself with a short sword. Split logs for the funeral pyre are shown scattered under the bed. Dido was the legendary Queen of Carthage who was abandoned by her lover, the Trojan hero Aeneas (Virgil: The Aeneid. 4). Landau rejects the attribution to Georg Pencz on the grounds that the emotional expression of the print is beyond the latter's ability, surely a most uncommon reason for removing a work from an artist’s oeuvre. It belongs now to a monogramist unknown but clearly a master.