A coleric fool...

[mmfilesi]

Hi friends!

I think the fool's Leber is a choleric fool, like appeared in Mundus alter et idem of Joseph Hall (In Moronia Aspera).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hall_%28bishop%29

Sorry, only I have it in Spanish. I am not in Spain, at home, and can not find it in English. Use the google translator.


"Whenever they do come loaded with weapons, so that they may lack for clothes, but not for all sorts of weapons. Same type, very ordinary, like the page of weapons of Mars, travels everywhere wearing a bombard the right shoulder, a club to the left, next to the sword, the other a knife, bow and Alija their backs. Who, from afar, they do not need to give way to prepare to fight or die. Rare is the output that does not end with injuries or deaths. He who kills another butchers it voraciously, they eat raw meat, usually human flesh, which was considered one of the most succulent delicacies and smooth with a few drinks blood. "

-----

«Siempre que salen lo hacen cargados de armas, de manera que les puede faltar para ropa, pero no para toda suerte de armamento. Un mismo tipo, de lo más corriente, como si fuera el paje de armas de Marte, se desplaza a todas partes llevando una bombarda al hombro derecho, un garrote al izquierdo, a un costado la espada, al otro un puñal, arco y alijaba a la espalda. Quien, ya desde lejos, no les cede el paso es necesario que se prepare para luchar o morir. Es rara la salida que no termine con lesiones o con muertes. El que mata a otro lo descuartiza vorazmente, pues comen la carne cruda, habitualmente carne humana, a la que consideran una de las delicias más suculentas y que suavizan con unos tragos de sangre».

[mikeh]

According to http://books.google.com/books?id=2p8MAA ... &q&f=false

Hall was considered a weak imitation of Rabelais.

And aren't we in the "braggart captain" territory, of which there was much satirical prose written?


Why does he have his tongue out? Is he challenging someone? Or does he have honey on it, and the bees are chasing him out of anger.

If honey, I found an interesting reference in the translators' footnotes to Alberti's On the Art of Building in Ten Books. "Pliny mentions maenomenon mel, a kind of honey in Pontus that was said to cause madness. Pliny N. H. (Natural.History) 21.77." It's in footnote 41, p. 369. I wanted to get that noted before I lost it.

http://books.google.com/books?id=OFGTd1 ... &q&f=false

Alberti (p. 14) doesn't mention it; he's talking about a honey-like sap, and "anyone that tasted it would fall unconscious for a whole day, as if dead," according to Xenophon, and a plant that drove Antony's army "insane, and made them intent on digging up stones,until their frenzy reached such a pitch that they collapsed from disturbance of the bile, and perished, there being (according to Plutarch) no antidote, except wine."

Perhaps frenzy and madness count as choler. Madness is connected with the card: the guy is acting crazy. But the it is probably just satire, directed at ordinary people being ridiculous, like the "braggart captain" stories.

Good suggestion, mmfilesi.

[mmfilesi]

Thanks friend .

+++

Hall was considered a weak imitation of Rabelais.

Well... I think the first chapter is similar to Rabelais, but the stupids chapter (the land of Moronia) is more similar with Sebastian Brand and Erasmo.

As you know, exist many types of narr: melancholic, lazy, skeptics... Exist too the angry narr. I need find more angry fools and whether always represented with many arms.

[mmfilesi]

Bingo!

Cesare Ripa - Furore

furore.jpg

(180.27 KiB) Downloaded 1526 times

[mmfilesi]

I write an article in my blog about the Leber Fool and his relationship with the coleric foolnes (Ecclesiastes 10). In spanish, sorry.

http://www.mmfilesi.com/blog/?p=497

[mikeh]

Good article, Marcos, from what I could make out (well, you or Huck have said a lot of it here), including the bit at the end, about the artist of the Leber = artist of Sola-Busca. (And the Hurst quote is something for English-speakers). Regardless, the Leber deck shows that the Sola-Busca wasn't the only deck in that style. Trionfi.com has linked it with another fragmentary deck, which they merge with the Leber. They say it is the same deck. I don't know. Hind lists it separately and a little later.

[mmfilesi]

Thanks firend, .

The first part explains what is a fool choleric, as appears in Mundus alter et idem (Joseph Hall) and Cesare Ripa.

Then, talk about the flies + fools of Ecclesiastes and explained (as hypothesis) they can be relationship with Domiziano, who love hunts flies.

Huck's hypothesis about the relationship of Sola Busca - Leber can be read here:

http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t= ... fonso+1491

[mikeh]

I want to contrast the Charles VI and Leber Fools in the social context of 15th-16th century Florence as revealed in novellas about madmen.

In the Charles VI Fool card, boys throw stones at the Fool, who next to them is a giant and so far does not seem to notice what the boys are doing.



It turns out that children throwing stones at Fools was a stock occurrence n Florentine novellas of the 15th and 16th centuries. A 16th century example is the story "Falananna," in Grazzini's Le cene (which is a collection of such stories), in which a man is persuaded to pretend he is dead and so participate in his own funeral. Michel Plaisance, paraphrasing the story, notes that at one point

...people begin to think that he [Falannana] has gone mad. Children start throwing stones and clods of earth at him, showing "mad, mad" and try to catch him. Dressed in his shroud, terrified by the shouting and the stones, Falananna heads for a bridge over the Arno. To avoid a cart he climbs up onto the parapet, loses his balance, and falls into the river where he dies atrociously burnt because, to confound his misfortunes, just at that moment a "sheet of Greek fire" arrives under the bridge. Transformed into a kind of blackened stump, Falannana achieves his dehumanization to an extreme.

(This is on p. 181 of Pleasance's Florence in the Time of the Medici. According to the author's introduction, the chapter I am citing was originally "La folie comme marquage en moyen d'exclusion dans la nouvelle florentine du XVIe siecle," in Visages de la folie (1500-1650): domaine hispano-italien, eds. Augustin Redondo and Andre Rochon (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981): 23-32; and then in Michel Plaisance Antonfrancesco Grazzini dit Lasca (1505-1584). Ecrire dans le Florence des Medicis, Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli 2005, 123-134.)

One might wonder in the above quote if "blackened stump" was a reference to "taroccho" meaning "fool" as well as "stump," as has been discussed elsewhere in this Forum. Plaisance does not give the original Italian.

In general, the intent of the stoning was to drive the victim out of town or kill him. Of another such victim, his pursuers are

children and clerks--who, as Grazzini says, would have killed him had they caught him. (p. 184)

No penalties are mentioned for this deed. For the crowd, the victims merit this treatment not for anything they did but merely because they are mad. It appears that madmen were not welcome in Florence.

That such stonings also were part of 15th century novellas is evident in one by the artist and architect Brunelleschi (1377-1446) in which a character says

...if this were known, I would be disgraced and regarded as mad: children would purue me and I would be in great danger. Plaisnce p. 178).

And in a story by Machiavelli, a peasant offers a demon-donkey evicted from Florence "shelter in a manure heap to save him from his pursuers" (p. 176). Macchievelli portrays the peasant sympathetically throughout;, who "proves more cunning than the devil."

But Machievelli is an exception. In Florence of this time generally, the countryside was considered the place of fools and madmen. Plaisance writes

...the peasants are kept at a distance from the city by the city-dwellers who label them instance so as to justify their own actions. Boccaccio and Mateo Villani both speak of the mad peasant, the "villan matto" whose violence is a source of fear. [Footnote 3.: Boccaccio, Decameron VII, 4; Camporesi, La maschefra di Bertoldo, 33. For the differences between the words folle, passo and matto, see Croce, Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo, 209.] The Florentine chronicler Paolo da Certoldo (c. 1320-post 1370) advised against confronting peasants when they formed a group: the only way to tame them, according to him, was to keep them hard at work on the land. The system of the messadria (sharecropping or metayage) made it possible to isolate peasants from one another by dispersing them int the countryside. In literature, great emphasis was placed on their ugliness and bestiality, and on their kinship with the donkey. The Sienese Gentile Sermini (active 1420s) claimed to be able to recognize peasants from their donkey's ears even when they were dressed like city dwellers. [Footnote 4. Sermini, Novelle, Story 32; see also Camporesi, La maschera di Bertoldo, 16. There is very little information available on Sermini; one of the few studies on him is Nissen, "Apostolo Zeno's Phantom Author."] ...Despite Macchiavelli's positive depiction of a peasant, Florentine culture as a whole was the culture of a city that always managed to keep its countryside well under control and was very little market by it. (p. 176).

In this demonization of the countryside, there may also be an unspoken association with the god Saturn. With his sickle, he was historically a god of agriculture, who in swallowing his children sought to prevent the next generation from suppressing his authority. As power shifts from the country to the city, he is an enemy of society. When the Charles VI Fool plays with a belt of gold medallions--rather like the gold chains worn as a necklace by the privileged, as in a Titian portrait at http://www.artsunlight.com/artist-NT/N- ... html--that perhaps is taken as an illegitimate and threatening aspiration. (For more on the Fool as Saturn, see the "Fool" thread in Bianca's Garden here.)

But the stories of the 15th and 16th centuries take a different twist, subversive of the city's power. The protagonists, usually lower-class city-dwellers or country people in the city, are are made to appear mad by a coordinated conspiracy of upper-class practical jokers called beffatori (from beffa, practical joke). For one reason or another, usually self-serving, one of their group wants to remove the object of their jokes from the city. In this respect, they are like the insects buzzing around the Fool's head. Their practical jokes infuriate the object of their prank, thus serving to confirm their labeling of him as mad. As a mad person, he is not subject to the law. But apparently he is not protected by the law either, for then the children can be unleashed on him with impunity. (Like the card, he is not even the lowest member of society; he is outside the social structure altogether.) In the context of the increasingly authoritarian regimes of the later Medici, the reader's sympathy is with the so-called "fool" who is powerless against the illusionists.

In the changing context, the message of the Fool card perhaps also changes. Whereas in the Charles VI, our sympathy is with the Fool because his genial nature (like that of the peasant) does not justify the attacks on him by the boys, in the Leber, the Fool, i.e. peasant or worker (or nonconforming humanist) is right to defend himself against his tormentors; however his weapons are inadequate for the job, and so appears as a fool if he rebels.

[Ross G. R. Caldwell]

It turns out that children throwing stones at Fools was a stock occurrence n Florentine novellas of the 15th and 16th centuries. A 16th century example is the story "Falananna," in Grazzini's Le cene (which is a collection of such stories), in which a man is persuaded to pretend he is dead and so participate in his own funeral. Michel Plaisance, paraphrasing the story, notes that at one point

...people begin to think that he [Falannana] has gone mad. Children start throwing stones and clods of earth at him, showing "mad, mad" and try to catch him. Dressed in his shroud, terrified by the shouting and the stones, Falananna heads for a bridge over the Arno. To avoid a cart he climbs up onto the parapet, loses his balance, and falls into the river where he dies atrociously burnt because, to confound his misfortunes, just at that moment a "sheet of Greek fire" arrives under the bridge. Transformed into a kind of blackened stump, Falannana achieves his dehumanization to an extreme.

(This is on p. 181 of Pleasance's Florence in the Time of the Medici. According to the author's introduction, the chapter I am citing was originally "La folie comme marquage en moyen d'exclusion dans la nouvelle florentine du XVIe siecle," in Visages de la folie (1500-1650): domaine hispano-italien, eds. Augustin Redondo and Andre Rochon (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981): 23-32; and then in Michel Plaisance Antonfrancesco Grazzini dit Lasca (1505-1584). Ecrire dans le Florence des Medicis, Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli 2005, 123-134.)

One might wonder in the above quote if "blackened stump" was a reference to "taroccho" meaning "fool" as well as "stump," as has been discussed elsewhere in this Forum. Plaisance does not give the original Italian.

The phrase used is ceppo di pero verde - "a chunk of green pear (-wood)" is a legitimate translation, I think. It's from the Seconda Cena, Novella II, which you can find in many different editions by typing the phrase "ceppo di pero verde". So it has nothing to do with proposed etymologies of tarocco based on taroc meaning a "stump of wood" or something like that.

Thanks very much for finding the story in any case. I think it is reasonable to believe that throwing stones at fools (and other idiots, undesirables, beggars, and the rest) was a literary topos already in the 15th century, based on actual practice, both ad hoc and ritualized. But, I haven't found a lot of evidence for it - not that I've done a thorough search.

I would like to find examples of the topos in literature or iconography closer to the earliest Tarots, like the Charles VI.

The only other one I've seen so far is by Giotto, from about 1320, where a stupid brat appears to be throwing stones at Holy Poverty herself.


It is from this larger picture -


- which itself is from a complete "Allegory of Poverty" by Giotto, in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi. Naturally this is one of the most photographed churches in the world, so you can find dozens of pictures of the entire triangular fresco by searching Google Images with "allegory of poverty", if you are interested.

Perhaps it refers to the townspeople of Assisi driving Francis out of town when he "marries" Poverty. Of course he is known as a "holy fool" for Christ, but I seriously doubt there is any connection between the Charles VI image of the Fool and the use of the stone-thrower motif in the church at Assisi.

[mikeh]

Thanks for clarifying what the Italian word was that was translated "stump," Ross.

Ross wrote,

I would like to find examples of the topos in literature or iconography closer to the earliest Tarots, like the Charles VI.

The only other one I've seen so far is by Giotto, from about 1320...

I quoted from Plaisance's paraphrase of a story by Brunelleschi (1377-1446). Also, Machiavelli's (1469-1527) story, which I also included, isn't too far removed.

A question I have is how specific this topos was to Florence. If it does not occur elsewhere, that would tend to localize the Charles VI to that city. The d'Este Fool, somewhat similar, has no stoning. Your example in Giotto suggests that it probably existed in Assisi. Plaisance, focused on Florence, doesn't answer my question, although one sentence suggests that it probably occurred elsewhere. After a sentence I quoted--"Despite Machiavelli's positive depiction of a peasant, Florentine culture as a whole was the culture of a city that always managed to keep its countryside well under control and was very little market by it--Plaisance adds:

One has to travel to Bologna at the end of the sixteenth century to find Bertoldo, a descendant of Marcoulf [Footnote 7: A rough but wise character who wins over King Solomon in the medieval text Diologus Salomonis et Marcolphi; see Croce, Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo, 169-197], and his son Bertoldino, two complementary variants of the mad peasant, settling in at court to impart lessons.