passionals

Updated: July 12, 2025

We have this to ask, even granting that our "burlesque picture" is a natural, almost a necessary, accompaniment of human life, was found, we may quite safely assume, in the cave-dwelling of primitive man, who probably satirised with a flint upon its walls those troublesome neighbours of his, the mammoth and the megatherium, peers out upon us from the complex culture of the Roman world in the clumsy graffito of the Crucifixion, emerges in the Middle Ages in a turbulent growth of grotesque, wherein those grim figures of Death or Devil move through a maze of imagery often quaint and fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible takes a fresh start in the Passionals of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century.

Selwyn Brinton - The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature