Man with a Basket Brooch

To date we have read two scholarly explanations for the motif of this brooch. In one the man is mooning the woman who has just “given him a basket” – that is, jilted him. In the other, he represents a proverbial fool who tries to carry darkness into a building in a basket. If you have any other explanations, we’d love to add them to our collection.

We made this quite a while ago and, in a classic error, reversed the direction of the figure by making the mold look like the example (instead of its mirror image). That example was found in Bruges, and dated 1375-1425.