Pierre Belon's Marvelous Nature

Belon, looking very grave, despite his decidedly whimsical hat.  

Intimate Reader, in the spirit of my posts on the art of Albrecht Dürer and Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, and the polymath-ness of Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, I present for your consideration a vignette on the life and work of sixteenth-century French physician, naturalist, traveler, artist, and man-about-ville PIERRE BELON (1517-64).  

Born near the famous all-night horsecart-racing town of Le Mans, Belon studied medicine at Paris, and traveled to Germany to work with famous physician and botanist Valerius Cordus, who formulated a synthetic "sweet oil of vitriol" (ether), which he hawked around the German countryside as an old-time cure-all elixir.  Sadly, Cordus, the famous author of those early modern bestsellers The Dispensatorium and the Historia Plantarum, later died of malaria after a "research trip" to Italy. 

Valerius Cordus, who, as Belon's academic adviser, kept one eye fixed upon him at all times.

 

Belon, now duly armed with two-fisted know-how of natural philosophy, returned to France to be taken under the benevolent wing of a certain Cardinal François "Effectively France's Foreign Minister" de Tournon.  His patron gave him a generous allowance of francs to go on a lengthy journey to study the flora and fauna (including Turks!) of the Mediterranean and Levant.  

In 1546, he set out, eventually traversing the extensive territories of the Sublime Ottoman State, including Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia and Palestine.  Returning to the Île de Paris in  1549, Belon wrote and illustrated a lengthy account of his travels, Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie et autres pays étrangèrs ("Observations of Divers Singularities and Memorable Things Found in Greece, Asia, Judea, Egypt, Arabia, and Other Foreign Countries"), published in 1553.  

He also wrote several scientific works of considerable value to comparative anatomy, particularly the Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons ("Natural History of Strange Fishes"), 1551; De aquatilibus ("Of Aquatic Species"), 1553; and L'Histoire de la nature des oyseaux ("History of the Nature of Birds"), 1555.  

The best depiction I could find of a French early modern religiously-motivated assassination.  This one depicts the killing of King Henry IV in 1610 by the Catholic François Ravaillac.  Unfortunately, Belon was killed at night, however, and probably not in a royal party-coach. 

A Catholic and a royal favorite during the time of Reformation-era Wars of Religion, Pierre Belon was assassinated, probably by an Elect-loving Huguenot, in Paris one evening in April 1564, when coming through the Bois de Boulogne park ("Baloney Forest"), perhaps returning from a visit with a lady of the night. Unlike his fellow sixteenth-century compatriot King Henry IV (a Huguenot!), Belon was unable to escape the assassin's blade on the first attempt.*

Despite his sad end, Belon left posterity some great scientific work and some interesting illustrations, several of which I produce below.  Enjoy! 

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer": A Paul-Bunyan-sized gentleman falconer and his Roc-sized falcon, or perhaps the dog is an early example of the French craze for all things miniature? From The Nature of Birds.  

Possum-lizard?  From Observations.

 

   

Exotic fauna: Saracens (L) and Turks (R).  From Observations.

  

"Portrait of a Circassian nobleman, or Arabs on horseback, who were the riches lords of Egypt, when the Sultan [Saladin?] ruled there."  From Observations.

         

Some owls!  Belon observed that, while most owls liked to perch on tree limbs or stumps, that the French Barn Owl preferred to roost on a living rodent.  From The Nature of Birds.  

Human and Bird Skeletons Compar'd.  From The Nature of Birds.  

Ghost shadow parrot!  From The Nature of Birds.  

The strange marble-column roosting French variety of woodpecker.  From The Nature of Birds.

Ce ne sont pas unes pipes!  From Observations.

Here there be dragons.  From Observations.

Non-horned and Horned Snakes.  From Observations.

  

The Roman Emperor Hadrian, floating on the Tiber with his pet hippo, Antinous.  From Strange Fishes.

More hippo (walking on water)!  Eating an iguana?: "Removed from the statue of the Nile, of the garden of Belueder at the palace of the Pope in Rome." From Strange Fishes.

Sea serpent!  From Strange Fishes.

 

"Picture of the Order that the Latins called Orca or Orcynum."  From Strange Fishes.

The Arbalestre, or Crossbow (now called Hammerhead) Shark.  From Strange Fishes.

And, finally, a wing'd and be-scyth'd Satyr, patron saint of French anatomists. From Strange Fishes.

Well, Exalted Readers, I leave you now a little older, and perhaps a little wiser.  If nothing else, you've learned to never trust a strange Huguenot you meet on the road in the dark of night.  

Until next time, the Cabinet is closed.  

 ___________________________________________________________

*   "Henry IV finally was killed during the third attempt on his life, having fended off would-be assassins Pierre Barrière in 1593, later broken on the wheel, and Jean Châtel in 1594, who had his hand burned off with molten sulfur, lead and wax (a punishment for attempted regicide) and then was dismembered.  Ravaillac suffered the same molten hand-burning, but was drawn and quartered (like in Braveheart), which was perhaps not so different from dismemberment, in the end.  Bon temps!" 

- Extract from my forthcoming volume, Several Interesting Anecdotes of Attempted and Successful Royal and Political Assassinations, and their Subsequent Punishments, in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, Together with a Treatise on the Art of Early Modern Regicide (self-published).  

Lost without James Boswell

James Boswell at the tender age of twenty-five*.  It is not known widely that Boswell was a great Owl-Fancier, and, for many years, kept a parliament of them on the roof of his house in Covent Garden, London.

Reader(s), in past posts, I have made no secret of my great enthusiasm, daresay eighteenth-century-style Mania, for great English writer and wit-factory Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first acclaimed Dictionary in our language. (See my previous entry on the Quotable Doctor.) But, in my ungentlemanly submission to the Passions, I haven't given Johnson's biographer and close personal friend James Boswell his proper due.

Some critics, specifically the Victorian-era historian and critic (and fellow Scottish blowhard) Thomas Babington Macaulay, have attacked Boswell as, "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer."  Furthermore, he was an "eavesdropper, a common butt [of jokes] in the taverns of London" who was "curious to know everybody who was talked about...vain of the most childish honors."  What others "would have hidden was matter of gay and clamorous exultation" to a man with such a "weak and diseased mind." 

The Ghost of Samuel Johnson appears to graphomaniacal biographer James Boswell, his arm extended in foreboding perpetual greeting to his frightened-looking "Retailer of Phrases."

Kind words from the 1st Baron Macaulay! Few, however, have such a low opinion of Boswell these days, and Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome goes unread**, while the Life of Johnson endures as a classic of English literature.  And Boswell, despite his predilection for pomposity and prostitutes, couldn't have been as bad as all that.  

If nothing else, I admire not only the young man's ability to will into being, through sheer doggedness, a friendship with the much older and much more famous Dr. Johnson, but stand in awe of the stamina and single-mindedness necessary to crank out over a thousand pages of reminiscence and anecdote on said acquaintance. Truly, with Mr. Boswell, we have a remarkable character, exemplary of the eighteenth-century self-fashioning man-about-town, not to mention one capable of great Epicureanism and womanizing!

The dearly-departed and armless Dr. Johnson (literally) looks down upon his biographers, his pseudo-mistress Hester Thrale, left; tricorn'd John Courtenay, center; and squinting "Bozzy" (Johnson's actual nickname for him), right.  (Thomas Cornell, 1790s)

Boswell was born in 1740 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Despite growing up among a race of incorrigible oat-eaters and English-corrupting Lairds, Boswell  made it to the metropolis of London by 1763. There, poised to while away his time in libertine debauchery, the twenty-two year-old had a chance meeting with fifty-four year-old Samuel Johnson at a bookshop that set him on the path to star wagon-hitching and literary immortality.***

During their first encounter, Johnson, upon learning of Boswell's origins, chastised him, to which Boswell responded, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it," to which the Bard of Lichfield replied, "That, Sir, I find, is what a great many of your Countrymen cannot help!"  

A gathering of "The Club."  Johnson is seated and alert, ladeling out more rum punch for his fellows (and strangely puffing on a pipe).  The wig-less man to the left of Johnson, with a glass raised and patting him on the head, is the hack writer Goldsmith, and the man dozed off with a horn in his hand is the portraitist Reynolds.  As usual, Boswell, lies, fallen out of his chair, in a stupor of his own creation, in the foreground.  (Engraving by William Hogarth, 1765)

The two eventually became bosom friends, as Boswell insinuated himself into Johnson's inner circle of literary and artistic luminaries (The Club), despite the occasional aside from Sir Joshua Reynolds or Oliver "Stoops to Conquer" Goldsmith to the effect of, "Who the DEVIL is that young Scotch Blighter with the lousy [lice-infest'd] Periwig?" 

In 1773, the pair road-tripped, after much nagging by Boswell, to the exotic wilds of the Scottish Hebrides Islands. Boswell memorialized this moor and thistle-saturated holiday in his book A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D, published in 1785.****  The memoir acted as (what the hive-mind of Wikipedia calls) a "teaser" for Boswell's forthcoming much longer treatment of Johnson's life.  

The first edition of Life of Johnson, printed "for Charles Dilly, in the Poultry" (not this).    

Boswell's biography was by no means the first published after Johnson's death -- seemingly everyone from his erstwhile and harshly-named confidant Hester Thrale to his beloved black Jamaican manservant and heir Francis Barber felt compelled to scribble down their impressions to make a guinea.  Boswell, though fond of a shilling as much as any man, began the great labor of composing his biography soon after Johnson's death but did not finish it until six years later. And what a "damn'd thick square book" it was, with the current Penguin Classics edition coming in north of 1,400 pages.  

Truth be told, Boswell's biography isn't much like most of its modern counterparts.  Much of the content consists of entire quoted letters and extensive entries from Boswell's diaries, stitched together by contextual narrative.  To be fair, Boswell also includes lengthy excerpts from Virgil and Horace from his Latin school books, most of the contents of his address book, and recipes for Rum Punch and Wassail. Yet, out of this muddle, Boswell succeeds in creating a variegated and inclusive portrait of not only Johnson, but of eighteenth-century literary culture. 

So what is the legacy of this Man of Letters, producer of perhaps the greatest biographical portrait existing in English?  Bigot and sot, or true friend and chronicler?*****  Pick up the weighty tome yourself, and decide for yourself!  Like the King James Bible, or the Adult Classifieds, it makes great random reading.  

Well, I retire to my drawing room anon, to read a little of the Life myself. I will aspire to imitate dear Boswell's work in form, if not length, in future posts.  Until next time, Courteous Readers, the Cabinet is clos'd.  

_____________________________________________________________

* Before stage four syphilis had set in.

** The film adaptation, though, proves to be enduringly popular at adult video stores.  

*** Don't worry, though.  Boswell still had ample opportunity for debauched vice, and capitalized upon it most splendidly!

**** Johnson had published his own much more generic account of the Scottish sojourn, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (with some native Guy nam'd Boswell) eight years earlier, in 1775.  

***** Boy, they really need footnotes on Blogger.  Also, I recently discovered that Johnson and Boswell might have moonlighted as something akin to eighteenth-century amateur detectives (thief-takers, perhaps?), courtesy of Lilian De La Torre's engaging series of narrative biographies.  

Baseball, the Great English Game

 

The National Pastime: A bat-and-ball game, called "baseball," but looking an awfully lot like cricket, from the 1767 book, A Little Pretty Pocket-book, essential for every young amateur sporting fellow.  

It's Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and, in our fair United States of America, that means the return of the Grand Old Game, baseball! Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season is nigh, so, here at the Cabinet, we thought we'd take the opportunity to reflect on the amusing origin and peculiar history of that most "American" of sports.

It was Jane Austen, that great promoter of amateur sport, who wrote of one of her heroines in her 1799 novel Northanger Abbey: 

It was not very wonderful that Catherine who had by nature nothing heroic about her should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback and running about the country at the age of fourteen to books.

 

 An 1804 watercolor portrait by Cassandra Austen of her sister Jane engrossed in spectating a game of village cricket played near the family home in Bath.

As this rousing quote from the Queen of British Novelists shows, most now agree that baseball evolved from several English bat-and-ball games brought to America's shores by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists.  But what of these peculiar pastimes, so foreign to Americans today yet embraced by Albion and much of its former empire?

Foremost among these ancestors of baseball is CRICKET, which originated as a children's game, perhaps related to BOWLS (lawn bowling), during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, adults, perhaps as a result of new-found, sheep-induced leisure time, took up the sport. The first reference to cricket being played by adults occurred exactly four hundred years ago, in 1611. Two men from the dragon-infested county of Sussex were brought to court for playing the game on a Sunday instead of attending church. Their fate is unknown.

An illustration of a cricket ground at Darnall in Sheffield, England, from around 1820.  Not sure about those teepees in the crowd -- mark it up to the influence of George IV's oriental tastes, I guess. 

Originally, the bowler ("pitcher") rolled or skipped the ball toward the wicket ("home plate") in the hope of getting it past the batsman ("batter") and knocking down the bails perched atop the wicket stakes ("striking them out"). At first, the cricket bat ("bat") resembled something like a shepherd's crook, but, after the introduction of sidehand and then overhand throwing, it took on a straighter, more recognizable shape. (It is now perhaps most familiar to Americans as an ornamental torture device used in the collegiate Greek system). It remains popular among shepherds, however, who still champion a return to this older, more pastoral form of the game. I will not attempt here to explain all the intricate rules of cricket, nor will I try to define such vital concepts as the Googly, the Diamond Duck, the Chinese Cut, the Nervous Nineties, the Perfume Ball, and the Dibbly Dobbly, for these are sticky wickets indeed to the cricketing novice.  

 

Cricket Bats: The first two examples on the far left date from 1720 and 1750, respectively.  

(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The game of cricket, of course, has a huge non-American worldwide following today, particularly in the former colonies of Britain's nineteenth-century empire, including the nations of the former British Raj, antipodean Australia and New Zealand, and troublesomely-Dutch-infested South Africa.  It has traditionally been a slower-paced, more genteel game than baseball, at least judging by all those tea and cucumber sandwich breaks and white sweaters, but a new, quicker game, more resembling baseball in its pacing, has been adopted eagerly by the huge community of Indian cricketers.

"A game of Yuletide Rounders at Baroona, Galmorgan Vale," Australia, played on Christmas Day, 1913. Note the player in the back dressed as Father Christmas.

But baseball is not solely a corruption of cricket. Another English bat-and-ball game, ROUNDERS, more closely resembles baseball in form and has been played in England since the sixteenth century. Like the American Game, it includes four bases, nine players to a side, and is organized into innings. Each side takes turns batting and fielding, and a player's successful run around the bases scores a run.  

As you might imagine, these similarities struck fear into the hearts of American baseball boosters at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many saw it as unpatriotic to admit that the most American of sports was merely a bastardized version of British games.  The most ardent champion of the native invention of baseball at was Albert Goodwill Spalding, he of the sporting goods company and magnate of the Chicago White Stockings (today the Cubs) of the National League.

A great debate over the game's ancestry ensued after British-born promoter of baseball Henry "Hanging Harry" Chadwick published a 1903 article tracing baseball's origin from the "good old game of rounders, you know." Spalding, patriotic American that he was, appointed a commission, which reputedly included Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens and Theodore "Big Stick" Roosevelt, among others, to trace and evaluate the origins of baseball.  

Pioneers of Baseball: Promoter and ball-designer Albert Goodwill Spalding (left), British inventor of the box score Henry Chadwick (center), and aloof Gen. Abner Doubleday (right). 

This "Mills Commission" unearthed a 71-year-old man from Denver, Abner Graves, who had witnessed the invention of baseball by Abner Doubleday, later a Civil War general, in 1839, while he was stationed in Cooperstown, New York. (A town best known as home to the author of the Redstocking Tales and High King of the Adirondacks James Fenimore Cooperstown.)  Luckily, Doubleday was long dead, and the commission did not attempt to corroborate the old man's tall tale, despite the fact that Doubleday had never even played baseball or even watched a game.

Spalding threw an elaborate and expensive dinner party to celebrate the findings, held at Delmonico's in Manhattan, featuring huge, baseball-shaped souffles and waiters serving with mitts. Committee head Abraham G. Mills, in his address to the audience, summed up the findings of the commission with the curious epigram "NO ROUNDERS. NO ROUNDERS." The unruly and sloshed crowd started chanting Mills' report with increasing urgency, until a melee ensued, during which, among other injuries to those gathered, Henry Chadwick lost his beard and Mills strained his groin. But the commission's findings were accepted as fact, and, in 1939, on the hundredth anniversary of baseball's supposed origin, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was opened in Cooperstown. 

A photograph of the dinner at Delmonico's celebrating the conclusion of the Mills Commission's investigation, pre-melee.  

Well, friends and readers, how can I top that story of ardent yet misguided patriotism? I therefore must now bring this edition of the Cabinet to a close.  I hope that, through the stories of the fine English games of cricket and rounders, you have learned something of the origins of our Great Game, be it American or no!

The Ballad of Giles Corey: Salem's Stubborn Wretch

Trial of Giles Corey, an engraving by C.S. Reinhardt from noted old windbag and thanatopsistic William Cullen Bryant's A Popular History of the United States, 1878.

*   *   * 

Giles Corey was a wizard strong, a stubborn wretch was he;

And fit was he to hang on high upon the locust tree.

So, when before the Magistrates for trial he did come,

He would no true confession make, but was completely dumb.

"Giles Corey," said the Magistrate, "What hast thou here to plead

To those who now accuse thy sould of crime and horrid deed?"

Giles Corey he said not a word, no single word spoke he.

"Giles Corey," said the Magistrate, "We'll press it out of thee."

They got them then a heavy beam, then laid it on his breast;

They loaded it with heavy stones, and hard upon him pressed.

"More weight," now said this wretched man.  "More weight!" again he cried;

And he did no confession make, but wickedly he died.

*   *   *

This anonymous early eighteenth-century ballad concerns Giles Corey (1611-92), a victim of the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692-3. While most convicted Salemites were hanged, octogenarian Corey has the special distinction (privilege?) of being the only one punished by being pressed to death.  


Ann Putnam, "Have No" Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Williams accused Corey of witchcraft in April 1692. Putnam alleged that the specter of Corey visited her and asked her to write in the Devil's Book (coincidentally some of your Humble Author's favorite bedtime reading). She later claimed that a spirit who'd been "murthered most foul" by Corey also appeared to her. It would seem that the "dread Wizard" Corey's hologramic avatar had gotten around, because other girls subsequently relayed tales of similar spectral pestering that confirmed Putnam's accusations.  Fellow supposed practitioner of witchcraft Abigail "Leviathan" Hobbes confessed in court that Corey was a warlock on April 19. Stubborn old Giles, though, refused to enter a guilty or not guilty plea, and was gaoled for several months. 

Giles Corey's Punishment and Awful Death, from Henrietta Kimball's Witchcraft Illustrated, 1892. (I'm trying to resurrect the publication of this magazine, if you'd like to contribute.)

When the court sat again in September, Corey again remained mute.  So, the Oyer and Terminer brought out the big guns: pressing, the prescribed punishment for refusing to plea.  This piene forte et dure ("hard and forceful punishment"), not to be confused with the later piano forte, called for the prisoner to be stripped of their clothes and made to lie on the ground.  Heavy boards were laid over them, and rocks were piled on the wooden planks, increasing in weight until the prisoner confessed.  The Massachusetts Bay Colony legal code called for the prisoner "to be laid on his back on the bare floor, naked, unless when decency forbids; that there be placed upon his body as great a weight as he could bear."  He must "hath no sustenance, save only on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and the second day three droughts of standing water, that should be alternately his daily diet till he died, or, till he answered."* 

During the course of two days, so the story goes, Corey was asked three times to plead innocent or guilty to witchcraft. Each time he replied, "MORE WEIGHT!" and a new load of New England's famous soul-crushing fieldstone was added to the growing cairn.  Finally, at "about noon...Corey was pressed to death for standing mute; much pains was used with him two days, one after another...but all in vain."** Because Corey did not plea, he died with full possession of his estate.  Some have written this motivated Corey to stay silent, because the convicted had to forfeit their property to the colony, but the reality such a law has been discounted. In any case, perhaps Corey's endurance was not solely the result of an iron will, but was the action of a father looking after the security of his progeny, and an iron rib cage.  

  

Henry Wadsworth "Old Firesides" Longfellow, nineteenth-century celebrator and hagiographer of Corey and other obscure colonial worthies.

Giles Corey's story had a surprisingly enduring afterlife.  The sentimental old fool/poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a play, one of his New England Tragedies, Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, about the stubborn Salemite. Longfellow's Corey justifies his actions to his bosom-pal Richard Gardner, saying: 

I will not plead. If I deny, I am condemned already, in courts where ghosts appear as witnesses, and swear men's lives away. If I confess, then I confess to a lie, to buy a life which is not a life, but only death in life. I will not bear false witness against any, not even against myself, whom I count least.

Compelling stuff in the old nineteenth-century melodramatic tradition, I say!  As Corey dies, Longfellow puts these words in his mouth: "Here is my body; ye may torture it, but the immortal soul ye cannot crush!"  Although an unexpected burst of King-James-style eloquence from a man being pressed to death, it is, I think, a fitting and inspired pun, courtesy of the Bearded Bard of Boston. 

An illustration by Howard Pyle of an upright Corey, from Giles Corey, Yeoman

Another play about Corey, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman's Giles Corey, Yeoman, appeared in 1893. Freeman's characters are duly impressed by Corey's fortitude, even if it is drawn from Old Nick. "Truly such obstinacy is marvellous!" one magistrate remarks, in such an "unlettered clown" and "old tavern-brawler."  Like Longfellow, Freeman portrays Corey as a principled man of good New England stock, presager to the region's great reformers and abolitionists of the nineteenth century, of whom only a few were brutally pressed to death by New England field stone.  

Corey also turns up in gravelly-voiced Marilyn Monroe beau Arthur Miller's famous play The Crucible (1953) -- as seen in the clip on the right from the 1995 movie.  Although John Proctor, played by Miller son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis in the film version, is the real star of the play, Corey puts in a brief but memorable performance.  I'm sad to say, though, that neither the stage nor screen performances include any full-frontal nudity.  


Well, Courteous Readers, the end of the Ballad of Giles Corey draws nigh.  I hope this Puritan's moral resilience has inspired, or at least that his tale has amused.  Until next time, the Cabinet is closed.  

________________________________________________________


* I'm sorry to dash your hopes, but this punishment was not common in seventeenth-century New England, and Corey was the only person in colonial America to be pressed to death in this manner. This, of course, does not include the unfortunate printing press deaths connected with Boston resident Benjamin Harris. Look up, though! Its use was more widespread in Olde England, last employed in the 1740s. 


** From the diary of Samuel Sewall, a Salem witchcraft judge, early abolitionist, merchant, Harvard grad, prolific scribbler, and an all-around a real Mensch.  

Curious Paintings by the Dutch Masters

If anyone truly knows anything about your modest and enigmatic Blogger, it is of my great enthusiasm for oil paintings from the seventeenth-century United Provinces of the Netherlands (AKA the Dutch Republic) and its culturally-poorer counterpart, the iron-lantern-jaw-ruled Spanish Netherlands.  

The famous Weberian Protestant aversion to sloth that produced the capitalistic madness of Tulipmania! also gave us those famous tobacco-loving Old Dutch Masters. Although today the feathery-haired Rembrandt of the Rhine or lazy pearl-loving lech Jan Vermeer are the perhaps the most well-known seventeenth-century Netherlandish artists, a whole host of lesser stars shone in the Dutch artistic firmament.  

And the Dutch liked to commission some weird pictures.  Maybe this had something to do with the high number of painters-per-capita in cities like Amsterdam and Delft.  Or perhaps it was related somehow to all those dams and dykes.  Most likely, though, it was because those damned Calvinists burghers had more slave trade profits, Javanese plantation guilders, and tulip credits than they knew what to do with -- so why not commission some unique art for your townhouse on the canal?

At any rate, here I present a sampling of said eccentric (to our modern eye) oil paintings, with a brief running commentary by this poor man's Simon Schama:

Anatomy Lesson by Dr. Frederick Ruysch, Jan van Neck (1634-1714), 1683.

Sure, the precipitous growth in medical and anatomical knowledge during the seventeenth century had to have been achieved through some pretty gruesome research, but...what the f**k?!?  I don't even know where to start with this one.  An anatomy lesson, with a baby?  A kid holding a baby skeleton?  If this doesn't prove the strange, foreign-countryness of the seventeenth century, then nothing will.  Also, I'm glad they're pointing at baby, because I WOULDN'T NOTICE IT otherwise!

Banquet of the Officers and Subalterns of the Haarlem Calivermen Civic Guard, 

Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638), 1600.

The Dutch Republic was noted by its contemporaries for its problems with urban overcrowding.  That's why half of these guys packed up and globetrotted to New Ha(a)rlem a few years later.  I'm glad that's just a chicken on the table, though.  

But wait! This other van Haarlem is even straanger! 

The Fall of Lucifer, 1588.

This painting erroneously titled The Fall of the Titans until the 1920s.  Whether they Judeo-Christian or Greek mythological figures be, one can't help but notice those unfortunate butterflies covering the unmentionables of those fallen angels/future incubuses. 

Rich and Poor, or War and Peace, Unknown Artist.  

This biting social commentary is obviously from the Spanish Netherlands :(  Jeez, it looks like it was painted in 1409 -- nice use of perspective, international gothicist!  And if that's supposed to be different avatars of the same guy, you fooled me, unknown artist!

But wait! I (naturally) have several more bread-related paintings for your enjoyment:

A Baker Blowing his Horn, Gabriel Metsu (1629-67), 1660.

This baker looks pretty satisfied with his diverse output of breads, although his servant girl/wife in the back seems to be less impressed.  Get a load of that "horn of plenty," and notice those pretzels up on that early modern pretzel rack.

And take a look at this inferior baker-portrait copycat:

 

The Baker, Job Berckheyde (1630-93), 1681.

This baker's horn-blowing seems a little more labored, perhaps because his servant girl is out on the canal lollygagging for the young men.  And maybe he's upset because he has no cool ornamental bread loaf propped up on his counter or awesome blue-leafed botanical curiosity hanging above his head. 

Still Life with Dog and Cat in Front of a Lobster, Jan van Kessel the Younger (1654-1708), c. 1690.

The Dutch turned the still life painting into high art, although I don't know if a scene with so many living, almost living, or boiled animals qualifies as a still life OR fine art.  This is, in fact, one of a series of three (that I can find) still life paintings of weird seafood by van Kessel.  I guess the demand was high for lobster-on-Delftware scenes. Some other (real!) van Kessel favorites include Two Cats Playing with Fish (below), Monkey among Fruit, and Dwarfs with a Dog (also below).

*     *     *

Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, David Bailly (1584-1657), 1651.

Those predestination-obsessed Calvinists sure liked their vanitas (reflections on the transitory nature of life and constant presence of death) paintings. But most vanitas scenes did not have (non-skull) people in them, let alone people holding paintings of old guys (or dowel rods, or long clay pipes, for that matter)!

Here's another strangely personal vanitas portrait:

Vanitas Portrait of the Painter, Antoine Steenwinkel, Date Unknown.

Steenwinkel had so little vanity that I can find little or nothing about him or this painting in my vast reference library (organized using the Cotton system).  I'm not sure if the guy holding the painting-in-a-painting is supposed to be the artist (or, indeed, the same person whose skull sits on the table).  "Like sand through the hourglass, so are the (short) days of our early modern lives."

And here's another painting-in-a-painting:

Margareta Maria de Roodere and Her Parents, Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656), 1652.

What to do when you want a family portrait, but one of your parents has gone to (fingers crossed) join the Elect in the sky?  Have your artistically-inclined daughter paint a portrait of her father from memory and then commission another, superior male artist to paint the whole gang! Also, those Dutch really enjoyed pointing at obvious things.

The following is another great van Honthorst specimen:

The Concert, 1624.

Whoa, check out those buxom lutists! I'm not sure what the baby-angels with laurels in town are contributing to the concert, however. 

The Bull, Paulus Potter (1625-54), 1647.

I've heard tell that the bull at the center of this interesting pastoral scene was anatomically impossible, exhibiting characteristics of several breeds and different ages of cow-maturity.  But I'll trust the Gorton's fisherman on the left, who doesn't seem to mind his anachronistic menagerie too much. 

A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, Carel Fabritius (1622-54), 1652.

This Rembrandt protege meant for his curious painting to be viewed mounted on a curved surface to fully enjoy this experiment with perspective.  Despite what our earlier piece The Concert might lead you to believe, it doesn't seem as if this lutemonger is doing too much business in Bizarro-Delft.

The Council Chamber in Amsterdam Town Hall, Pieter De Hooch (1629-84), 1665.

(Or, Scene with Giant Ominous Curtain)

Finally, we have this group portrait, where we see, among other things, yet another (partially obscured) painting-in-a-painting.  Although this is a council chamber, not much business seems to be getting done, perhaps because everyone is staring at the huge curtain floating above their heads.  

*   *   *

Well, art-lovers, its time this Sister Wendy retired to her cloister to prepare another fact-filled gallery tour.  I hope you've enjoyed our little trip through the Dutch Golden Age. Until then, the Cabinet is closed.