
Beham’s engraving of two foot soldiers manages to capture the visual bluster and noise of war despite its small size. Both wear mail armor, with the standard bearer also equipped with a cuirass, a kind of breastplate. Yet this piece of armor is an antiquated model, and these figures may in fact be Landsknecht impersonators. The inscriptions identify the drummer as a bumbling “Farmer Conrad” and the standard bearer as “Klaus Swineherd,” a reference to the Bauernkrieg, a major German peasant uprising that mercenaries summarily suppressed in 1525.