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Soldiers of MisfortuneThe Drawings of Urs Graf the Elder
A mercenary and miscreant, the Swiss Renaissance artist Urs Graf lived the violence and vice he summoned on his drafting table. Miya Tokumitsu introduces us to his astonishing drawings of soldiers and sex workers, and finds an impotent melancholy within these often nightmarish scenes.
November 11, 2026
Urs Graf the Elder, Prostitute Inviting Love, 1514 — Source.
Many artists draw ably; a rarefied few draw with an animating touch that can imbue a single line with meaning, mood, and character. Some soft scribbles and scratches become an owl with a scowl full of menace and cynicism. A thatch of quick slashes forms a clump of grass that radiates the carnal energy of the figure before it, a young woman offering herself for sex.1 These marks appear in the work of Urs Graf the Elder (ca. 1485–ca. 1528), one of the great maestros of the pen, who possessed one of the wilder imaginations of the sixteenth century. A mysterious and troubling figure, Graf bequeathed to the world a set of astonishing drawings filled with erotic-melancholic imagery: virile soldiers and wily prostitutes, with a supporting cast of satyrs, lecherous monks, and fools. His iconography reflects the context of Swiss martial culture during the Italian Wars of the early sixteenth century, interpreted via his self-consciously bizarre sensibility. Yet his compositions continue to fascinate due to their punchy, graphic style and their audacious visual meditations on sex and death. Centuries before Freud, Graf plumbed the far reaches of these fundamental human drives.
Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, around 1485, Graf was taught by his goldsmith father, Hug, from whom he presumably learned the fundamentals of design and draftsmanship in addition to metalwork techniques. As a young man, between 1503 and 1509, he worked as a designer of book illustrations in Strasbourg and as a goldsmith in Zürich, finally settling in Basel and establishing his own enterprise. In 1511, he married Sibylla von Brunn; their son was born the following year. While establishing his artistic career and family, Graf fought in at least four military campaigns as a Swiss mercenary, or Reisläufer: he set out to Rome with a troop from his hometown of Solothurn in 1511; joined a Basel expedition to Dijon in 1513; fought French and German forces at Marignano in 1515; and in 1521 marched on Milan and Bicocca.2
At home, Graf was a notorious and incorrigible miscreant. He was censured and jailed numerous times for transgressions that included: spousal battery; adultery and patronizing prostitutes; mocking and slandering local citizens including a priest, tailor, and coachmaker; and assaulting locals, often without apparent provocation. In 1518, he fled the city following an assault so violent that his victim was permanently disabled. He was permitted to return the following year, however, as the city was in need of a die-cutter for its mint and Graf’s talents proved too compelling for them to cancel him permanently.3 Basel’s publishers, too, continued to seek his services as an illustrator. From 1527, documentation of Graf’s activity evaporates. Sibylla remarried in October 1528 (one hopes, to a nicer man), suggesting that Graf had died or disappeared from Basel by then.4 That year, Graf would have been about forty-three years old.
Somehow, amid all his decamping for battle and local troublemaking, Graf managed to be a prolific and successful artist. If he were active today, he would surely qualify as a “multihyphenate creator”, skilled as he was in book illustration and single-sheet woodcut design, metalwork, stained glass production, engraving, and drawing. Graf also experimented in the novel technique of etching, which emerged around the 1510s. From his goldsmith training, he developed a keen sense of design and ornamental composition that disposed him favorably to the book publishers of Basel and Strasbourg who employed him as an illustrator. (That he evidently worked quickly was surely a boon, too.) Drawing was the medium in which Graf was truly groundbreaking, however.5 He employed an eye-catching graphic style to depict vernacular subjects in transgressive scenarios; it is a visual strategy that remains effective still today, evident in the work of Kara Walker, who also reformulates figures and tropes from popular media like silhouettes and minstrel shows into nightmarish scenes.
Urs Graf the Elder, Woman with Child and Fool, 1525 — Source.
In one of Graf’s many drawings of sex work, a mercenary soldier and prostitute stand together as a couple, in a half embrace. This is no love match; wearing a weary expression, the woman fondles the man’s purse, which dangles from his neck just above his codpiece and a perpendicularly hanging sword. Gazing down at the coin bundle being evaluated, the man extends an open hand in a gesture of negotiation. Each person has something the other wants as well as their own risks to weigh. If rejected, the man suffers sexual humiliation. By issuing such a rejection, the woman risks provoking revenge in the form of battery and rape — a possibility suggested by the man’s burly physique and ample, priapic weaponry. She could become pregnant out of wedlock, a condition with its own jeopardies and burdens. The specter of venereal disease looms over both figures. The least harmful outcome seems a mutually agreeable exchange of sex for money in which both protagonists depart, health intact. But given that women in the sex trade at this time usually entered it for lack of other means of survival, such transactions were hardly made on equal terms.6 Nevertheless, this woman has apparently made the best of her lot in life, as evidenced by her keys, heavy purse, and dagger — all common visual signifiers of a head of household during the early modern period. She is not entirely without power or authority.
Urs Graf the Elder, Soldier and Young Woman in a Landscape, ca. 1500–28 — Source.
Graf’s imagery opens a view onto the heady and hazard-filled world of the Swiss mercenary, a figure emblematic of political and social upheaval at the dawn of the modern era. It was the mercenary’s daily labor that implemented epochal shifts in war- and statecraft that emerged during the Renaissance. The Italian Wars (a yearslong mêlée that entangled Swiss, French, Italian, and German forces) engendered new methods of warfare that entailed larger-than-ever armies of professional troops, mostly infantry, skilled in modern weapons and tactics.7 A two-sheet panoramic woodcut by Graf’s German contemporary, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), pictures a sixteenth-century fortress siege, complete with large, disciplined troop formations, heavy artillery, and the logistical coordination of massive baggage trains. This is not the kind of operation that can be carried out by a labor force significantly padded with pressed peasant boys and village layabouts. It required large numbers of competent, battle-hardened soldiers. This new way of making war, defined by the simultaneous professionalization and expansion of armies, came at an unprecedented financial cost, producing another now-familiar piece of state machinery: sprawling, sophisticated taxation and credit systems.8
Albrecht Dürer, The Siege of a Fortress, date unknown — Source.
This modern warcraft shook up the Swiss social order. In 1477, Swiss pikemen surged into continental renown following their victory over Charles the Bold and his Burgundian knights in the Battle of Nancy.9 Armies from all over Western Europe were keen to fill their ranks with Swiss recruits. Rather suddenly, a Swiss youth from the countryside, who had previously faced a future of cowherding, now had the opportunity to enjoy travel, adventure, sexual hijinks, and potential riches in the form of war booty. All he had to do was enlist with the recruiter passing through town. In fact, enough Swiss cowherds enlisted that their German battlefield antagonists, called Landsknechte (“servants of the land”), coined a panoply of cow-themed epithets to describe them: Kuhmäuler (cow mouths), Kuhbuben (cow boys), Kuhschwäntze (cow tails).10 Mercenary culture quickly embedded itself into Swiss society, and it became common for men, urban and rural, to dabble in warfare for a campaign or two.11 It was not only the uneducated or destitute who answered the calls to fight. Graf’s artist compatriot, Niklaus Manuel (ca. 1484–1530), also did some turns as a mercenary. In addition to his pursuits in the visual arts, Manuel was a playwright and member of the Bern civic council from 1510 until his death — a true Renaissance man.12
Not all mercenaries were able to toggle successfully between military and civilian life like Manuel, nor was campaigning all swashbuckling and upward social mobility. Even if one survived the battlefield, injury and disease were persistent hazards. Wages were easily drained in taverns, brothels, and gambling dens. Loot, if there was any at all, could be more meager than envisioned. Townsfolk were often wary of soldiers who left trails of vice, disgraced women, orphans, and damaged property. Veterans frequently descended into vagrancy, drunkenness, and beggary. Disabled, addicted, or otherwise unproductive men became a social cost borne by resentful citizens.13 Municipalities also suffered labor loss as young men opted to become faraway fighters rather than locally productive agricultural workers or trade apprentices.14 (City governments had nominal authority to cap the number of local recruits, but enforcement of such policies was ineffectual and unregulated enlistment abounded.)15 The mercenary was therefore a dyadic social figure: on the one hand, a dashing glory seeker; on the other, a dangerous, dissolute fool who would have done better to remain home and earn an honest living.16
Urs Graf the Elder, Allegory of the Fortunes of War, ca. 1516–18 — Source.
Graf allegorizes the wager of the mercenary life in a drawing depicting War Fortune as a beautiful woman adorned with jewels. The sword shaft that passes over her genitals unsubtly indicates the sexual spoils that the victorious soldier enjoys alongside his financial ones. Fortune’s posture is fleeting, however. She stands atop a sphere in waters placid enough to mirror the landscape and sky; the sun shines and a nearby boat has lowered its sail. But the winds always change, portended by a few pillowy clouds and a gently drifting plume of chimney smoke. More to the point, Fortune holds aloft an hourglass whose sands are in motion.
In other works, Graf celebrates the mercenary as a figure of youthful vigor and local pride, with little seeming hesitancy about the costs of war, personally or socially. Graf made a number of drawings and prints — including a remarkable suite of white-line woodcuts — depicting wide-stanced standard-bearers proudly displaying the flags of their cantons. Standard-bearers were field specialists tasked with displaying their units’ ensigns during battle for both organizational purposes and morale; their visibility (and hence vulnerability) entitled them to extra pay.17 Graf’s standard bearers are full of braggadocio with their slashed tunics, buoyant hat feathers, and flags in full spread. Such images were part of a larger visual culture of collectible military prints (and some drawings) that began to flourish in the 1490s, just as soldiers were becoming an increasing social presence due to the expansion of infantries.18 Graf’s woodcut series makes overtures to collectors’ patriotism, depicting a soldier and ensign from each canton, and also appealed to buyers with a completist bent — they could “collect the whole set” and enjoy comparing and contrasting the characteristics of mercenaries across the Swiss confederation. The novelty of the white-line format, too, would have appealed to print connoisseurs.
As Graf knew from experience, the ideal of heroism is often a mystification of the soldiering life. Throughout his work, soldiers are by turns foppish and foolish, vulnerable and cruel, subdued and occasionally gentle. In one humorous drawing, a Swiss soldier is almost completely subsumed by his out-of-control penchant for fashionable ostrich feathers. This accessory was particularly popular among Swiss soldiers, so much so that the German Landsknechte mocked these proto-dandies as Federhansen (Feather Jacks).19 Although Graf could poke fun at his fellow Swiss mercenaries, he often transposed objectionable qualities of soldiers onto their German rivals. In one sheet, the bad character of a Landsknecht — identifiable by his short sword and distinctive beret — is evidenced by the fact that he has been ensnared by a devil who personifies the Landsknecht’s own wicked impulses. The fool’s shoe and prominent testicles on the beast signal the Landsknecht’s folly and lasciviousness.20 In another drawing, a Landsknecht has squandered his war spoils; his sword inscribed with the words AL MEIN GELT VERSPILT (“all my money is spent”).
Antagonists to Graf’s Swiss fighters do not appear solely in the guise of enemy Landsknechte. Women are also shown to be nefarious figures in soldiers’ lives, capable of emasculating them through financial chicanery, heartbreak, and venereal disease. Graf shows soldiers to be particularly vulnerable to the wiles of women, who appear in his works in a cast of camp followers, prostitutes, attractive maidens, and occasionally, wives and sweethearts. Many of Graf’s depictions of women are straightforwardly misogynistic with a dose of humor, such as one drawing of a prostitute taking her mouse (slang for female genitalia) out for a walk, and another depicting a busty prostitute exposing her thigh and emptying a purse of its coins.21 Other depictions of women seem sympathetic, even tender: a woman brings a jug to three infantrymen as they all enjoy a peaceful day by a lake; another takes the arm of her paramour on a stroll; yet another with two children gazes wistfully at her husband — the purse hanging from her belt indicates she will be managing the household while he is away.
Urs Graf the Elder, Soldier and Woman with Two Children, ca. 1508 — Source.
Still other images of women by Graf are nightmarish. One camp follower strolls unperturbedly by a hanged man whose corpse is pecked by birds. A nude woman commits suicide by plunging a dagger into her breast while a man drowns at her feet. A woman with no arms and one leg stands before a landscape. This last figure has received ample attention, with hypotheses about the cause of her limb loss ranging from horrific domestic abuse to war crimes. Art historian Jess Bailey identifies the woman as a sex worker and concludes that, given the strong unlikelihood of someone recovering from multiple major amputations in Graf’s era, the image is a fantastical one, reflecting an appetite for imagined sexual encounters with, or images of, women whose bodies were brutalized in ways beyond what would have been survivable.22
Urs Graf the Elder, Armless Prostitute with a Peg-Leg, 1524 — Source.
A haunting quality pervades Graf’s imagery, from the satirical to the distressing; he shifted register in his art more often than tone. One allegorical drawing that manages to be humorous while still rather mournful depicts a Landsknecht walking into the distance. Hoisted across his shoulder is his pike, from and upon which curious objects and creatures dangle and perch. Several of these inscribe the Landsknecht’s emasculation and weakness for women: a bird (“to bird” or vögeln, was slang for sexual intercourse), a spindle (a tool of women’s work), a hedgehog (slang for female genitalia), and a mouse (the same).23 Also undermining the soldier’s manhood are a pair of eyeglasses, the device of the voyeur who cannot approach but only peep at women.24 The dagger and purse were traditional symbols of the paterfamilias or head of household, but here, as art historian Christiane Andersson notes, they have become separated from the soldier’s person, as if he is not fully a man.25 The empty saltbox is another sign of sexual weakness, as men of the period sometimes carried salt in their pockets as a superstitious ward against impotence.26 The owl screech, “IE IE”, spelled out above the bird, audially resembles battlefield cries of lament, indicating that the Landsknecht’s demise is nigh.27 The efficiency and power of Graf’s draftsmanship is magnificent. Every element of the simple line drawing has its purpose. The Landsknecht’s sagging pike and flaccid feather reinforce his impotence. The long, late-day shadows at his feet, made with a series of quick, simple strokes, imbue the scene with a forlorn air — the sun is setting on this man.
Urs Graf the Elder, Satire on the Vices of the Landsknechte, ca. 1514 — Source.
Urs Graf the Elder, Battleground, ca. 1521 — Source.
While ascribing intentionality to artists is always a dicey proposition — especially when they are as sparsely documented as Graf — it is difficult not to feel that he is communicating something about himself in his drawings. Graf was drawn to the battlefield, even as he had a family and career to occupy him at home, and violence permeated his life. His relations with women were by all accounts abhorrent, and there is so often a sadness to his depictions of sexual relations that — to reach a bit — seems to indicate some self-knowledge of his severe failings in this area, even if he perhaps bore no regret or remorse. Like many modern veterans, Graf the warrior-artist felt a persistent lure to the horrors of the battlefield, and he was unable to comport himself properly at home. Maybe he kept returning to the battlefield because it was there, rather than home, where he felt most himself. Graf and the swaggering, unlucky soldiers in his art stand in contrast to Dürer’s stoic, steadfast Christian knight. Dürer certainly pictured a lofty ideal, one nearly impossible to achieve. But then, he never tried it himself.
Miya Tokumitsu is the Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection at Wesleyan University. Her writing encompasses art historical scholarship and cultural criticism.
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