The Siege and Capture of Sint-Andries by Maurice of Nassau

This Dutch woodcut combines three scenes—left, a Flemish figure kneeling in defeat; center, a fortified town under assault; right, a devil-like creature amid chaos—to celebrate Maurice of Nassau's military victory. The narrative unfolds across panels with dense caption text below, a format ancestral to the modern comic strip.

Etched in the tradition of Northern European Bilderbogen (picture-sheets), this print uses caricature and grotesque figuration to mock Spanish-aligned regions while glorifying Protestant Dutch expansion. Such propagandistic broadsheets, combining image and text to shape public opinion around warfare and politics, established the visual-verbal language later refined by Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson—foundational to comic art.