Roma Caput Mundi  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Signs of the imminent end of the world have always been of popular concern, and in the sixteenth century these included continuing interest in the late medieval concept of the Antichrist, and of the equally venerable theme of the World Upside-Down. The Antichrist survived the Reformation to emerge in Lucas Cranach's Passional, Christi and Antichrist, with text by Philipp Melanchthon. Comets were another ill omen, such as the one that marked the 1468 meeting between Pope Pius II and the emperor Frederick III, depicted in a political cartoon of the day. Other such ominous signs included both human and animal misbirths: the Siamese twins who shared a single leg, Dürer's sixlegged Monstrous Sow of Landser[1], and the supposed discovery in 1496 of a monstrous creature with a woman's torso, the head of a donkey, one cloven hoof, and an eagle's claw, immortalized in Wenzel von Olmütz's engraving titled Roma Caput Mundi[2]. After the dangerous year of 1500—feared by many as the possible end of the world—had safely passed, and been replaced by the issues of the early Reformation, this creature was recycled by the Cranach workshop as The Papal Ass (1523).