Monnik met een eigendomsakte (Monk with a Deed)

This engraving depicts a rotund monk holding a property deed, his bulging features rendered through bold cross-hatching typical of early eighteenth-century printmaking. The work belongs to a Northern European tradition of clerical satire—targeting monastic wealth and corruption through grotesque physiognomy. The figure's exaggerated body reflects period prejudices linking moral failing to physical appearance, a visual language inherited from Dürer and Cranach and later perfected by Hogarth and Gillray. Religious institutions' land acquisitions fueled Protestant and secular criticism across the Low Countries and the German-speaking world. This print exemplifies how caricature served as popular political commentary before the political cartoon proper emerged, establishing conventions—distortion, symbolic props, satiric exaggeration—that would eventually shape the comic tradition.