Another Kind of Bird: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly

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Glutton for edification (or punishment) that I am, I finished Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly yesterday. Oh, you might say, the humorous points of that 15th century thinker’s wit shouldn’t be so difficult to follow (discounting the shifts in language usage, ignorance of medieval theological debate, or amount of interest in people speaking in the persona of minor Roman deities)? But I will reply, I was suffering from such extreme sinus pressure I couldn’t even remember the name of ‘that thing you take a temperature with’* when I was describing my awful pain to my doctor.** I was too fuzzy-headed even to post!

But Erasmus was a fascinating man:

Exhibit A: The bastard child of a monk, Gerrit Gerritszoon renamed himself ‘Desire Desire,’ first in Latin and then Greek (Desiderius Erasmus). That’s excellent.

Exhibit B: When Martin Luther led the Reformation and others defended Catholicism, Erasmus stood alone. Erasmus was one of the greatest critic of the Catholic Church, yet thought it should be reformed from within, and part of that was to translate the scripture as accurately as possible from the original Greek, leading to his Latin version of the New Testament. Erasmus wanted it to be free of corrupting Medieval theology. (Martin Luther found his translation useful when creating a German version of the New Testament.)

Written in 1509 and dedicated to his friend Sir Thomas Moore, In Praise of Folly would no doubt have been more funny to me if satirical portraits of princes and monks struck home. He is unrelentingly witty, saying of theologians, in the persona of Folly: ‘That short-tempered and supercilious crew is unpleasant to deal with. . . . They will proclaim me a heretic. With this thunderbolt they terrify the people they don’t like. Their opinion of themselves is so great that they behave as if they were already in heaven; they look down pityingly on other men as so many worms.” Erasmus leaves no one out, including the Pope, so you can see why the Catholic church prohibited this, and all his other works, from being read.

A freethinker whose only allegiance was to books, he was also a witty correspondent to some 500 of the most important individuals of his day. He died in Basel still at odds with the majority of the world. When Erasmus was accused of having “laid the egg that Luther hatched,“ he is said to have replied that he did, but he “had expected quite another kind of bird!”

*A thermometer.
**Apparently, I don’t even have a sinus infection like I thought, so I feel like a wimp. ; (

Francis Bacon at the Met

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Painting
Francis Bacon, the British painter (not Renaissance thinker Sir Francis Bacon), has always stuck out like a sore thumb in the history of painting. A sore gangrened thumb at that. When everyone else was painting abstractly, he remained resolutely figurative. Where people went to art school, he taught himself by going to museums. And when most people shy away from the sheer horror and grotesqueness of his jailed male figures surrounded by meat, he delved into it.
Triptych, 1974-77

The artist broke a record for contemporary art sales when a triptych of his sold for $86 million dollars last year, and he was the subject of two retrospectives at the Tate during his lifetime, and another last year. (He died in 1992.) Now the retrospective is moving to the Met (of all places). It opens tomorrow–and I look forward to seeing it. Jerry Saltz wrote an excellent article on Bacon in this week’s New York Magazine because of the new exhibition, asking the question “Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?” “Greatest painter of the twentieth century” is quite a title, and not one I’m sure I’d grant Bacon, although he was a good painter who created resonant, interesting works of great color. (If you want to see what a fascinating mess he was, Saltz touches on his life history.)

Figure with Meat

Bacon is a tough artist to understand: His paintings create such a visceral reaction in the viewer that I think it can be difficult to look beyond the subject matter. Margaret Thatcher famously described him as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” People commonly assume that such repetitive grotesque angst can’t be real, that he’s hamming it up. (Excuse the pun–and just be glad I haven’t tried my cleverness on his last name yet.) Saltz feels it becomes gimmicky, and so did quite a few people I was talking to the past Sunday. Yet the artist is at his best with these bruised mutants encased in flat rooms of color.

So what do you think, a yay or a nay for Bacon?

See Two Coats of Paint for more information on the exhibition itself.

Sex: Inspiring Ivory Sculptures Since 35,000 years ago

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Archaeologists in Germany have discovered the oldest known sculpture: a small ivory figure with no head or feet and very large breasts. It’s believed to be 35,000 years old, which argues that humans had developed a capacity for abstract thinking and creating symbols at an extremely early point in human history. When asked about the motivation for creating this piece, ” ‘It’s very sexually charged,’ said University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the figure in September.”

What was the impetus for this first sculpture? That’s anybody’s guess, and opinions range between fertility object or some sort of goddess worship. According to at least one archeologist, the reason humans first created a sculpture was sex, pure and simple. “These people were obsessed with sex.”

The figure bears this out: it’s feet didn’t break off–nor did its head. Similar sculptures of naked women without head or feet were made in the region at much later periods. An archaeologist from the University of Cambridge argued that “We now have evidence of that sort of artistic tradition of Venus figurines going back 6,000 years earlier than anybody ever guessed.” This figure changes both the estimated development of humans at this point in time and the context and meaning of the earliest art made.

Who knew sex was the thing that inspired us to crawl out of the primordial ooze?