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This woodprint is highly unique: abundant in meanings and symbols, it contains references rare for European printmaking and has been preserved, it would seem, in just a single copy or possibly in two. This very uniqueness of the print and its few but sublime relationships with the tradition are the reason why we have the pleasure to present this work in the series of collector editions of Biblioteka Tradycji Literackich (Literary Tradition Collection).
The most fundamental and significant source of the figurative part of the Image of the Trusty Servant woodcut is the evangelic parable of the talents, which the lord gave to his servant. In its bottom part, the woodprint is enriched and complemented with quotations from the Bible.
However, thanks to René Saulnier, art historian and an author of the magnificent L'Imagerie populaire de France (Paris, 1926), tracing the French and English presentations of Le Bon Serviteur and Trusty Servant became possible. In case of the French woodprint, even the original literary source of the presentation was discovered. The ten-verse-long text placed under the etching was taken from a work of Pierre Gringore, a consummate poet and playwright active in late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, recognised, besides François Villon, the best artist of the new period.
Thus the visual work, most probably French, that the Polish woodcut was shaped on, included solely lay texts whose meaning was practically satirical. In the case of the Polish work, the hardly altered image is equipped with a biblical commentary highly dissimilar from its original distant in both time and space. Such an exercise, in turn, changed both the message and the atmosphere of the print.
The Polish Image of the Trusty Servant is imbued with far-reaching biblical meaning: of far higher and more moralising nature. Yet the explanation of the servant's looks, presented by the servant himself, and contained in the four verses placed below the print, decidedly fails to correspond with the high (as it makes reference to the Bible) aura of the visual composition. The text has a 'taste' of the ridiculing tone of Eugenspigel poetry.
A major part of the text of the poem situated further below the print turns to the tradition of moralising and instructive works of the Specula type.
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