Sebastian Brant's richly textual broadsheets are illustrated with images that are crude in execution but possess an engaging vigour. From the 1490s onwards an increasing number of images of individual monstrous births were published in single sheet prints. Some of these were illustrated by leading artists, such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder. While the previous chapter established the shift from the monstrous race to the monstrous birth, this chapter examines representations of monstrous births in the context of developments in the artistic and broader visual culture of the period. It utilizes a variety of sources including Albrecht Dürer's own writing, and examines his attitudes towards natural wonders, monstrosity and artistic creativity. Lastly, it uncovers the variety and complexity of images of monstrous births in the years immediately preceding the Reformation. Many of the monstrous births discussed here are conjoined twins, and a number are even represented as propitious signs. Indeed, some monstrous births from this period were visually identified with one of the most revered figures imaginable in early modern culture: the infant Christ. This startling iconographic implication has gone unremarked in earlier studies, and positive representations of misbirths have in general received comparatively little attention. They are, therefore, the focus of this chapter. Yet negative representations of monstrous births, however, should not be overlooked, and this negative imagery, as the next chapter argues, finds a fuller and fundamentally apocalyptic expression during the Reformation.

The early sixteenth century is a celebrated period in the history of German art, and was perceived as exceptional even by contemporaries. There was a wave of optimism about German cultural accomplishment that endorsed the increasingly self-consciously creative abilities of German-speaking artists. The rise of a deeply Christian humanism in northern Europe at this time had a profound impact on artists like Dürer, Burgkmair and Lucas Cranach. These northern European artists became more artistically self-aware and their work demonstrates, as Craig Harbison expresses it, ‘an attention to peculiar imaginative and personal experience’.