Doolhof van Oorlog en Vrede (Labyrinth of War and Peace)

This Dutch engraving presents a circular maze centered on the concept of perpetual conflict and peace. Twenty-eight oval vignettes border the composition, depicting allegorical figures, military scenes, and symbolic objects—Fortune's wheel, a rooster, celestial spheres, and armored soldiers—all rendered in fine line engraving. The work exemplifies early-18th-century political satire's debt to emblem books and moral instruction prints. Rather than caricature through distortion, the artist employs symbolic denseness: each image encodes commentary on war, commerce, and statecraft. This tradition of layered allegory and sequential narrative panels—combining words and images to critique power—directly prefigures the illustrated broadsheet satires and story-sequences that evolved into modern comics.