Sebald Beham, The Devil as Bird Traper, 1525, engraving, illustration to Johann von Schwarzberg, Die Beschwerung der alten Teufelischen Schlangen mit dem Göttlichen Wort, Nuremberg, fol. CVI. Source.
The transformation of the devil into a banal fowler appears in contemporary literature, miniatures, emblems, and proverbs comparing the threatened soul of the Christian to a bird (Fig. 9.17). Bruegel’s contemporary beholders were familiar with these analogies and would have been able to recognize an allegory of the precarious condition of existence surrounded by temptations and pitfalls in this Brabantine landscape with a bird trap and skaters. A large part of the iconography of the bird-trapper in the culture of northern Europe from the end of the Middle Ages until the 16th century possesses an allegorical dimension: the bird-trapper is death, love, or devil who deceives and traps birds, which represent humanity or the human soul.
