Falcon Attacking a Pigeon

This is one of Menzel's earlier works. The painting, executed on several sheets of paper in oil paint and mounted on a wooden plate, was created around 1844. It was apparently actually used as a target image in a shooting club, as numerous bullet points that were later repaired prove. The painting came into the possession of the Berlin National Gallery in 1906. It was sold by the Berlin art dealer Ernst Zaeslein. In Georg Dehio's History of German Art, the picture was described as a masterpiece that Menzel did not held in great appreciation.^[2]

The title of the picture, in which the extended participle follows its reference word and which in some publications also contains a comma after the word "Falcon", was used several times by Germanists for considerations of the participle. In a 1962 anthology of the magazine Wirkendes Wort, for example, one could read that participles were a frequently used means in the fine arts to vividly reproduce the content of a picture, but that the picture would be “even more expressive in language if the participle follows its antecedent” and still take the final position behind the verbal additions, as is the case with Menzel's pigeon picture title.^[3]