'Good Counsel': An Adaptation from Ripa

away. The Greek inscription under the death-bed scene makes it possible to identify the original piece which these moralising drawings are supposed to reproduce. It is the fragment of a marble relief in Paros' (P1. I6a), which represents an assembly of pagan deities -among them Kybele, Atys, Pan, Acheloos, Silenus and Nymphs-who are humbly approached by a crowd of worshippers represented as small figures in the right corner. It is easy to recognise and distinguish in this relief the three parts which have served as models for the three drawings.2 The worshippers on the right correspond to the Christians listening to the sermon. Even the sinner who looks away has his prototype in the pagan group. The saint delivering the sermon imitates the deity furthest to the right, who stands just above the worshippers. The assembly of gods that follows on the left has suggested-mirabile dictu-the death-bed scene; while the group on the top corresponds almost literally to the upper drawing : Pan playing the syrinx has become the gesticulating devil that sits on the right, the devil with the long horns takes the place of the figure with the horned head named Acheloos by modern archaeologists; and the crouching Silenus has been transformed into the apprehensive sinner himself. It is not sufficient to explain this idiomatic translation merely as one of the homely semiGothic distortions of ancient models, in which the pictures of this codex abound (compare plate I6b with plate I6e3). The designer was evidently inspired to make these alterations by the Greek text which Schedel ingeniously mistranslated. In the inscription AAAMAZ OAPYZHE NYMPAIL, which signifies "Adamas the Odrysian (dedicates this) to the Nymphs", he mistook OAPY2HE for a participle of the verb