Flora's Mallewagen (Flora's Folly Wagon)

This engraving satirizes the Dutch tulip-trading craze through an elaborate allegorical procession. Flora, goddess of flowers, leads a ship-shaped wagon laden with merchants, fools, and revelers across an impossible landscape, their cargo of bulbs worth fortunes to speculators. The composition employs multiple narrative scenes in borders below—a tradition inherited from sixteenth-century German broadsheets—showing trading, deception, and ruin. The print mocks class pretension and economic excess through grotesque figures, exaggerated gestures, and visual puns. This format—combining political commentary, caricature, and sequential vignettes—prefigures the satirical print cycles of Hogarth and later graphic narratives, establishing the visual language from which modern comics descended.