Garden of Love / Fountain of Youth

In a paradisiacal garden, bordered in the background by three mighty trees like the pillars of an arcade and on the upper left edge of the relief by a fountain, seven young, unclothed women and men linger, some of them standing, some reclining. The subject of the relief, which may be a garden of love or equally a fountain of youth, was a favourite during the Renaissance, not least because it afforded the opportunity to show the nude body. Loy Hering, whose “talking” monogram featuring a fish is on the sign hanging from the middle tree, had one eye on Albrecht Dürer’s engravings as he created the female nudes. The figure at the centre of the composition quotes Dürer’s engraving The Dream of the Doctor, as well as Eve in The Fall, while the woman reclining in the right foreground is taken from The Sea Monster, and the couple embracing at the left are a slight variation on figures in Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads.