Quincampoix in duigen (The Collapse of Law's Mississippi Scheme)

This Dutch engraving depicts the violent collapse of John Law's Mississippi Company, a financial bubble that ruined thousands across Europe. The packed street scene shows frenzied crowds outside a building, with figures fighting, fainting, and gesturing in desperation as cherubs above scatter coins like rain. The printmaker uses dense, chaotic composition to convey economic hysteria—a visual vocabulary inherited from Renaissance broadsheets and developed by later satirists like Hogarth and Gillray. The print transforms financial abstraction into visceral human drama, establishing a tradition where political and economic satire relied on crowded, annotated scenes of social disorder. This engraving demonstrates how the popular graphic tradition documented collective delusions and served as a medium for public commentary on power and greed.