· By Klára Veselá · 1 min read
Two pictures of one morning
A news sheet printed in 1621 and a Dutch etching made almost eighty years later show the same execution. They don't agree.
Put the 1621 news sheet beside Jan Luyken’s etching from 1698 and you are looking at the same morning twice.
What the first one knows
The 1621 sheet has the town hall’s clock tower, the gallows on the right, the drummers, the names of the judges. Its engraver had reports from Prague, and it shows.
What the second one wants
Luyken made his etching for a Dutch book about martyrs. His square is a generic European square, his scaffold is crowded with bodies, and the mood is grief rather than news. It is a good picture, and a poor witness.
The lesson for a classroom: a print tells you about the event, and about the person who made it.