De Brakke Grond on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal Painting

This beautiful, and slightly bizarre, stone gateway was once the entrance of a churchyard. The church has long since been demolished, but the gateway still proudly remains and now leads to a square on the ground where the church once stood. It was only when I started to sketch this doorway that I began to notice some of the odd touches. At first glance it’s all fairly standard churchy stuff, there is an angel theme on the columns whilst lions adorn the pediment. But it was the heads that sit on each side of the text that caught my attention. The faces are unmistakably human, yet they have lion’s manes and cow’s horns together with very odd looking teeth. I believe that they are not in fact lions at all but instead are manticore. The manticore is a legendary animal that had the body of a lion, the head of a man, horns of a bull and a scorpion’s tail. It also was supposed to have three rows of teeth and could shoot poisonous spines from its tail! This completely insane sounding creature was first reported by the Greeks but was later adopted in the middle ages where it was sometimes used to depict the devil. There are also what appears to be garlands of flowers hanging from their horns. Clearly, at the time of their carving, there was a rationale to their inclusion but what that was remains a mystery to me.