Abstract

Image parodies emerge at the same time as Erasmus of Rotterdam’s text In Praise of Folly from 1511, which also exerted great influence on painters. Thus it is obvious to connect the first parodies by artists like Albrecht Dürer or Urs Graf with the literary fashion of the paradoxical encomium. In this context, both the success of the Erasmian text and the spread of parodic pictorial procedures that began in Northern Europe are connected to the possibility of open and hidden criticism. Erasmus allows himself simple jokes, but at the same time he criticizes the image cult of the Catholic Church or a misunderstood Marian piety. Image parodies are also accompanied by an open genre structure of varying character, which can be ironic in the sense of paradoxical encomium and polemical with reference to satire and the Reformation disputes.