Woman with mirror, serpent, stag and dog

Hans Baldung Grien painted this Woman with Mirror, Serpent, Stag, and Dog around 1529, a complex allegorical composition combining the traditional symbols of vanity (mirror), sin (serpent), lust (stag), and fidelity (dog) with a female nude figure in an ambiguous moral allegory. Baldung was the most provocative German painter of the early Reformation period, his images of witches, death, and female sexuality combining disturbing content with extraordinary technical mastery. This allegorical female figure participates in the complex iconographic tradition of virtue-and-vice allegories, though Baldung's typical irony makes the moral reading unstable—the beautiful nude figure is simultaneously the exemplum of vice and an object of aesthetic pleasure, the allegorical framework both providing moral cover and underscoring the ambiguity of the female body as both beautiful and dangerous.

The allegorical composition combines the female figure with symbolic attributes in Baldung's characteristic manner, which blends precise naturalism with an unsettling, almost sinister quality. The serpent and mirror add layers of moral symbolism.