Om löss och människor. Robert Campin, Adam van Düren och kampen mot ondskan

Abstract

Of Lice and Man. Robert Campin, Adam van Düren and the Battle against Evil

This article deals with two questions relating to the visualization of psychomachia, the battle between good and evil, in Early Modern Europe. One concerning Adam van Düren’s (1450–1532) relief on the well curb in the crypt of Lund Cathedral (signed 1514), where a gigantic, chained louse is sucking the blood of a helpless sheep. Several different suggestions about what the image means have been presented over the years, but no final solution has so far been reached. The other question deals with the depiction of Joseph working in his carpenter’s workshop on the right hand panel of the Mérode Altarpiece – attributed to Robert Campin’s (c. 1375–1444) workshop and executed c. 1427–1432. Several researchers have – especially after the painting was smuggled out of Europe in 1956 and sold in the USA – carefully examined all of Joseph’s tools and what he has made with them (two mousetraps). Everything has been provided with iconographic descriptions and exegetic interpretations, i.e. everything except the item Joseph is in the process of making. This conspicuously placed object is often passed over in silence or considered meaningless in the context. Based on entomological comparisons, modes of trapping bugs, contemporary images, the Bible and the Church Fathers, the author concludes that in the first case the overlarge louse, personifying evil, probably represents the chained devil in hell, and in the second, that the special object Joseph is making is intended to trap the evil bugs of devilish nature (corresponding to the mousetraps he has already made): a bedbug board.