The Nude Girl and the Abbot, from The Decameron

Art Historical Context

This woodcut illustrates a scene from Giovanni Boccaccio’s *The Decameron*, the celebrated 14th-century collection of tales told by ten young people sheltering from the plague. Created before 1534 by German artist Hans Schäufelein for a printed edition issued by Heinrich Steiner, the small print captures one of the book’s many stories involving cleverness, desire, and clerical hypocrisy—here featuring a nude girl and an abbot. As a woodcut, the work exemplifies the Renaissance technique of carving images into wooden blocks for repeatable printing, which helped bring illustrated literature to...

About the Artist

Hans Schäufelein|Giovanni Boccaccio|Heinrich Steiner · 1480–1540

Hans Schäufelein (c. 1480–c. 1540) was a German painter and graphic artist of the Northern Renaissance whose career placed him at the heart of one of the most dynamic artistic environments in European history. As a young man, he entered the workshop of Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg, an experience that proved decisive: Dürer's meticulous approach to draughtsmanship, his mastery of printmaking, and hi...