Hats Off to Erwin

I was rather pleased to see a comment left on one of my posts, recently.

Although, I was a tad alarmed at the message itself:

It seems that the picture a woman killing herself by being crushed by her husband's tombstone. That's what the caption says in Dutch.
See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kintzertorium/3090689838/

Taken out of context (and keeping in mind, that I didn't immediately see which post it had been submitted to, before approving it for publication), it seemed irrelevant to this blog.

That is, until I viewed the link. For curiousity's sake, of course.

And boy, did that pay off!

The link in question leads to a certain image dealt with in "Bad Captions" and "A Note on Bad Captions". Except, it appears to be a scan of the original image!

You might remember that in Frayling's book, a reproduction of the image was captioned:

A vampire rises from the grave, illustrating an early eighteenth century treatise on the undead.

Fortunately, the owner of the Flickr account (Kintzertorium) has retained the original's caption, which appears to read:

BIANCA RUBEA, Gemalinne van BAPTISTA Á PORTA Verplenert zig met de Graf zark van haar Man.

A commentator on the image, by the name of groenling, has even translated the caption into English:

"BIANCA RUBEA [her maiden name, I assume], wife of BAPTISTA Á PORTA / crushes herself with the tombstone of her husband."

At this point, I think it's fairly safe to say that the image does not depict a vampire.

The question is, who's responsible for mislabeling it in that manner?

The author? The publisher? The designer?

Now that'll be interesting to find out...

Oh, and Erwin, if you're reading: I really appreciated that link! Much appreciated indeed!