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Featuring the image of an athlete tugging at a rooted sapling, Impossible is the most enigmatic of the many small-scale engravings produced by Hans Sebald Beham. Juxtaposed with the adage “Nobody should dare great things that are impossible for him to do,” the image not only challenges the astute viewer to a game of wits: the resulting paradox also unleashes a cascade of ethical questions concerning the boundedness of the will, Christian freedom, human perfectibility, and the paradoxical conditions of self-knowledge. These issues came to the fore in the sixteenth-century debate over free will, which pitted humanists, magisterial, and radical reformers against one another. Beham's documented experience as a religious and political dissident during the 1520s raises the possibility that the print, made later in life, embeds still another allegorical layer: the conflicted situation of the artist in an era of reform and iconoclasm, Renaissance and revolution, hope and disillusionment.

NGRAVINGS designed by Maerten van Heemskerck were used often enough by sixteenth-century painters of stained-glass panels,1 but the subject of Daniel and the Priests of Bel and the Dragon is preserved in only two panels known to me. The apocryphal story (Dan. 14:2-21) states that the Babylonians worshipped Bel, whose statue was given large quantities of edible offerings daily. The nightly disappearance of the food convinced King Cyrus that Bel was a living god, but the prophet Daniel proved that the priests of Bel in fact ate the offerings secretly. Daniel covered the temple floor with ashes and Cyrus sealed the doors. The next morning Daniel showed the king that the priests and their families had a secret passage under the altar because footprints led to it, and they and not Bel, therefore, had eaten the food. Cyrus ordered the priests killed instead of Daniel (the alternative in the event that Daniel could not prove his point). Daniel was given the temple and statue and had them destroyed. One panel in Liege has been published by Anne-Marie Didier-Lamboray;2 the second is the subject of this notice (see Plate i).3 DidierLamboray refers to the rarity of the story in art generally, a rarity discussed earlier byJenny Schneider, whose starting point was a description of three Swiss drawings for stained-glass panels (which, if preserved, are unknown) and who also mentions the 1564 van Heemskerck drawings for ten engravings of the story published in 1565.4 The stained-glass panel which has come to light recently is rectangular (19 cm. x 22 cm.), corresponding to engraving no. 6, The Temple of Bel Destroyed (see Plate II).5 The vertical composition of the glass required