Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini
I’ve been furthering my research on the history of caricature, aided by two books: History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1864) by Thomas Wright and Caricature and Other Comic Art (1877) by James Parton, the two earliest Anglophone studies on the subject.
Both mention amusing examples of Roman caricature: the Pygmy caricatures in Pompeii.
Neither mentions the Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini (above).
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The Shell by Odilon Redon represents yonic symbolism.
Already in 1916 the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in Sex in Psychoanalysis[1] wrote:
“The derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis that the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.” (tr. Ernest Jones)
I found the above dictum while researching sexual symbolism. Ferenczi’s dictum was most famously referenced in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown.
The Trees have Ears and the Field has Eyes is the informal title of a two-sided drawing by Hieronymus Bosch.
The disembodied eyes are on the ground, the disembodied ears float in the woods.
I previously published an example of disembodied eyes here.
See disembodied and independent body parts.
Napoleon III nose caricatures from Schneegans’s History of Grotesque Satire
Following my previous post on [1] the concept of the grotesque body in Bakhtin’s book Rabelais and His World (which mentions the term grotesque 91 times), I did some research on previous books Bakhtin mentions in Rabelais and His World with reference to the grotesque.
One of the authors whose name pops up most (13 times) is that of Heinrich Schneegans, author of Geschichte der grotesken Satire (1894).
Bakhtin criticizes Schneegans for failing to notice the connection between caricatures of the human nose (above) and the phallic symbolism of the human nose. Sometimes a nose it not a nose.
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I’ve been reading up on the grotesque body, finally taking the trouble and the time to read how its ‘inventor’ Mikhail Bakhtin defined it.
Here you have it, from Rabelais and His World:
“Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, ordefecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other. This especially strikes the eye in archaic grotesque”. (tr. Helene Iswolsky)
It’s quite a beautiful piece of prose. It reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari saying “there is no castration” and Sloterdijk’s genius comment on the the arse: “the arse is truly is the idiot of the family.”
See embodied cognition, body genres and body politics.
Also, anything coming out of the mouth of a ‘wise fool‘: morosophy and its mutant siblings serio ludere and spoudaiogeloion are still of great interest to yours truly.
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat (ca. 1863)
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat (ca. 1863) is a photographic portrait of Charles Baudelaire taken by Étienne Carjat.
The photo was published in a widely distributed series entitled Galerie contemporaine, littéraire, artistique.
The piercing gaze of Baudelaire has not gone unnoticed. Arthur Symons in Charles Baudelaire: A Study (1920) noted:
In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if in a terrible rage ; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in a kind of convulsion ; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded type as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes in a wild revolt.
I remember quite clearly driving to Paris in 1994 and seeing for the first time the ‘Superboxes‘[1][2] by Ettore Sottsass on the occasion of his retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
I seem to remember — I’m not sure if this actually happened — but it now seems that somewhere along the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring around Paris, we entered a tunnel which took us all the way to the underground parking below the Centre Georges Pompidou. I like to drive in tunnels and it felt like I had lucked out in finding a secret passage to the belly of the Parisian temple of postmodernity.
In 1966, the ‘Superboxes’ — monolithic wardrobes or closets — were at the same time extremely minimalistic, seemingly a tribute to the “less is more” credo of high modernism; yet very maximalist: the colours and the laminate of these box-shaped wardrobes foreshadowed postmodernism.
In retrospect, the prefix super- in ‘superbox’ was rather popular in Italian design during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apart from the ‘superboxes’ there was superarchitettura and Superstudio.
But even outside Italy and outside of design, super was a popular prefix. There were supermarkets, there was ‘super’ leaded fuel, you had the Lee Perry Super Ape album and the Superfly film in entertainment.
See: “I Remember“
I’m confused.
First, while researching my book on female murderers I discovered that notorious serial killer Elizabeth Báthory (1560 – 1614) in reality probably never killed 600 girls, not even a hundred, perhaps not even one.
Portrait of Elizabeth Báthory
It was just a ploy to steal the fortune of the richest lady of Hungary, say new sources I’m inclined to believe.
And then yesterday I researched Gilles de Rais (1405 – 1440) and here too historians offer a rehabilitation of the gruesome knight, one-time brother-in-arms to Joan of Arc. In the words of Fernand Fleuret writing in Le procès inquisitorial de Gilles de Rais, maréchal de France:
Fancy portrait of Gilles de Rais (c. 1835)
Fleuret concludes that de Rais was “an innocent victim of one of the most heinous judicial machinations of history.”
There are no certainties anymore.
I wonder what Georges Bataille said on the guilty/not guilty question of Gilles in his book The Trial of Gilles de Rais (1965). I know that at the time of publishing The Tears of Eros in 1961 he still believed de Rais guilty, citing with relish the most-quoted passage:
English translation:
One of the reasons that historical trials are so unreliable is the use of torture. How much is a confession worth if it was obtained by torture? What is the reliability of such a forced confession?
While cycling to my local library I realized that there are limits to historical revisionism. There can be for example, no denying the Holocaust, although strangely enough many people continue to do so.
The Bitter Potion (c. 1635) by Adriaen Brouwer
The Bitter Potion is an oil on wood by Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer. It depicts a “low-life” young man with a grimacing face holding a bottle of medicine in his hand.
This type of painting is called a tronie.
It is a textbook example of Flemish genre painting and an excellent way to illustrate disgust, perhaps only equalled in poignancy by the noted self-portraits by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, which I’ve posted before.
The Bitter Potion is World Art Classic #300.
