Representing members in a government association, the panel depicts the parable of the Old Man and his Sons, also called The Bundle of Sticks, traced back to Aesop’s Fables. The rectangular scene sits above a long inscription. In the center, a king on his death bed is silhouetted against deep blue curtains. His many sons crowd on either side of the bed, each holding a single or bound group of sticks. The king demonstrates that bound sticks cannot be broken, but breaking a single stick is an easy task. Thus, he instructs them on the value of solidarity, The scene is framed by the members’ heraldic shields, two shields above and below and five shields to the left and to the right.

The lower left segment of the central scene is a replacement, evident by the different technique seen on the verso side. Mending leads appear throughout the panel.

The specific Civic Council commissioning the panel has not yet been unidentified. The central scene derives from one of Aesop’s fables, reputedly set in Greece during the sixth century BCE. The Old Man and his Sons, also called The Bundle of Sticks (Perry Index, no. 53), was retold in Roman times, with the identification of the man as Scilurus, a king of Scythia in the second-century BCE. The later text was associated with the Roman historian Plutarch, early second century CE. “Scilurus, who left eighty sons surviving him, when he was at the point of death handed a bundle of javelins to each son in turn and bade him break it. After they had all given up, he took out the javelins one by one and easily broke them all, thereby teaching the young men that, if they stood together, they would continue strong, but that they would be weak if they fell out and quarreled” (Plutarch, 1961, p. 27).

The parable was popular in Swiss stained glass of the Renaissance. In the Princeton panel the fable advocates unity in the ruling council of the city. The story of the dying man is placed in the center and surrounded by the arms of the council members. The man is shown as a king, but the bundle is of sticks, not javelins. Earlier, Tobias Stimmer had executed a powerful design focusing on the father’s deathbed (Geelhaar, 1984, pp. 416–18, no. 259, fig. 267). A panel, dated 1607, by Werner Kübler the Younger of Schaffhausen shows a similar arrangement of the parable in its central scene (Hasler, 2010, p. 251, no. 61). The inscription above the narrative image explains that the story of the brothers teaches that with unity, there is strength. In the Toggenburg area, Hans Jegli created a panel, dated 1624, on the theme for the couple Hans Bösch and Sara Scherer (Boesch, 1935, p. 50, no. 124, fig. 14).

The moral of strength in unity was also seen appropriate for family as well as civic accord, as evidenced in a panel depicting two brothers, Heraldic Panel with the Arms of the Brothers Caspar and Hans Loser (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 45.21.50, US_29). Dated to 1647, the panel is attributed to Abraham Wirth, Lichtensteig, Switzerland, and presents a vivid image of Skiurus’ sons breaking the sticks while they are separate but unable to break them when they are bound together.

Rolf Hasler has ascribed the panel to the Schaffhausen glasspainter Hans Heinrich Ammann (Hasler, 2010, pp. 70–72, nos. 83, 113, 114). Hasler illustrates the Princeton panel noting that by 1660 Ammann was well established in Schaffhausen as a Master Glasspainter. A panel ascribed to Ammann shows members of the City Court of 1692 surrounding a scene of the story of Zaleucus the Greek lawgiver who permitted himself to be blinded in one eye in order to apply a similar punishment for his son (Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, Mus. Inv. 16400; Hasler, 2010, pp. 276–77, no. 83). See a similar panel attributed to Amman showing the scene of the prophet Daniel before King Nebuchadnezzar surrounded by twenty-six coats of arms of the Schaffhausen City Court of 1675 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inv. no. 3006-1857).

Cited in:
Raguin, & Morgan, 1987, p. 86.
Raguin, 1998, pp. 57–58, 63–65, fig. VII.4.
Hasler, 2010, p. 71, fig. 41.