Artländer dragon
The Artländer dragon is a common figure in heraldry and has a proper name. He is a fictional heraldic animal .
The special feature compared to the well-known heraldic animal dragon is that it is wingless and legless .
Its occurrence in the coat of arms is limited to a few communities in Artland . The joint municipality of Artland has two dragons in its coat of arms. The coat of arms shows two dragons facing each other without wings and claws in confused colors in a red-silver shield split by a wavy cut . Further coats of arms lead him in the front field . These include the member communities Badbergen , Menslage and Nortrup . Gehrde leads this animal on both flanks, separated by a silver pole with a church tower.
Badbergen 
Menslage 
Nortrup 
Gehrde
The so-called Artländer dragon
The Artländer dragon is also called Drudemänneken . It owes its name to its use as decoration and carving on many pieces of furniture that are regionally distributed: the dragon may have had a protective function in rural areas to ward off harmful influences. The dragon is clearly visible in the very independent Artländer furniture culture. So-called "wave tendrils dragon head ornaments" adorn the richly designed front side of oak furniture: sideboards, cupboards and in particular tunnel or chest chests - mostly bridal chests. Towards the end of the 17th century, this special motif appeared, which became a key function for Arland furniture culture: the wavy tendril with a dragon's head, which appears exclusively in flat carving on stollen chests. The wave tendrils dragon head ornaments come from pattern books of the 16th century by ornament engravers, such as Cornelis Floris and Vredeman de Vries, who also shaped the hardware style of the Weser Renaissance and whose ornaments are found on the facades of castles and town houses in the Weser region and beyond in large parts of Lower Saxony and find Westphalia. Popular art also drew inspiration from these decorative forms. The church and choir stalls of St. Sylvester's Church in Quakenbrück, built around 1572, are one of the most striking examples. A comparison of the decor shapes in the Sylvester Church and on Artländer furniture shows that a number of motifs and arrangements have been adopted without significant changes.
After investigations by the group around Helmuth Ottenjann and the museum village of Cloppenburg, the wavy tendril dragon head ornament appears for the first time in 1602 on a piece of furniture from the Badbergen parish, but only became widespread from 1660 and was retained until the end of the 18th century.
Bars are also decorated with the dragon motif. The best known are the decorations on the choir stalls in the Church of St. Sylvester in Quakenbrück . Here the stalls with the dragon are dated to 1572 ...
literature
- Hermann Dettmer: Folk furniture from Artland and the neighboring areas. 4 volumes (text parts, color illustrations, sketches, maps). Cloppenburg, Museumsdorf, 1982–1998, series: materials on folk culture in north-western Lower Saxony, ed. by Helmut Ottenjann.
- Matthias Rickling: Fabulous Osnabrück region: witches. Giant. Lord of hell. Sutton Verlag GmbH, Erfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-95400-293-1 , p. 56.
- Heinrich Ottenjann: Old German farmhouse furniture. Landbuch-Verlag, Hanover 1954.