What's that speedboat doing there?

[malsperanza]

OK, this is really just a test to see if I can make these here html codes work.

In picture, painted in 1504, there is a guy driving a small speedboat on a lake, about midway down the image, on the right.

If you ask me, this is more mysterious than Leonardo da Vinci's bicycle, which is generally thought to be a modern forgery. (Sorry, folks. I bet you thought that was really Mark Wahlberg's penis in Boogie Nights, too.)

I mean, I can handle strawberries with feet. I can handle bunny-headed devils and people shitting gold coins and evil giant musical instruments. But what is that speedboat doing in a painting 400 years before speedboats were invented??

Comments

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

O_o

That is not a speedboat. That is a...shoe. That is why there are two of them. Also, how can it be a lake if people are standing on it? Although, that guy behind does look suspiciously like he is jetskiing.

Context, please?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

The painting is by Hieronymus Bosch, who was the Renaissance's biggest acidhead, apparently. It's the left wing of a triptych called The Garden of Earthly Delights, and represents the damned in hell. The lake is frozen because hell is ... well, proverbially veryverycold. Yes, people are skating in hell. The second speedboat (or shoe) has fallen through the ice, which does suggest that it might not be an inboard motorboat, as they are usually buoyant. It might, I suppose, be a pair of sleds.

*squints*

Nope. Speedboat.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is a sled which, in view of the driver's posture, is being propelled by flatulence, thereby giving the illusion of motorized movement. Flatulence was big as a propulsive force for medieval demons, as illustrated by several paintings I'm not quite motivated enough to look up right now.

This is really an amazing painting. I remember seeing copies of it when I was in high school and thinking, "how cool," from a jaded, stoner adolescent perspective. But you know, from the perspective of an adult with a modest sense of cultural history, this painting grows weirder and weirder.

*Goes off to look at DaVinci's bicycle. Wasn't that a story by Guy Davenport?*

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Hmph. Might be flatulence; I wouldn't be surprised. (And I encourage you to present your list of important medieval paintings of flatulence--the world needs that list.) But there is also a tiller between the guy's legs, isn't there?

I still say it's an early form of cigarette boat, like the ones in Miami Vice. Yah, those guys are all in hell for sure.

<3 Guy Davenport! Though I like his essays better than his short stories. (Great little essay on Tolkien in "The Geography of the Imagination.")

The bicycle is a funny story. The Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo belongs to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, which is a Vatican branch office, more or less. In the 1960s (I think) they decided to do some restoration work and sent it to a bunch of monks who were manuscript experts. An earlier binder had stuck several pages together and these were separated. When the codex came back to the library, the bicycle drawing was visible on one of those pages.

Huge PR! Leonardo invents the bicycle!!! (Well, it's plausible: he did invent a parachute, a submarine, and a helicopter.) Guy Davenport writes a short story; everyone else publishes scholarly essays.

Only problem is, the drawing is clumsy; at best it might be a copy by one of his students of a lost diagram of his (there are a couple of obscene drawings by students in his notebooks--they seem to have thought this was a funnyfunny thing to do). Also it is in brown crayon (i.e., hard pastel), which doesn't match anything else in the notebooks. The crayon cannot be analyzed to see if it's modern, because the pages were (conveniently) coated with a preservative during the restoration (following the practice of the time).

It is probably some monk's idea of a joke.

Ice skates, people

[(Anonymous)]

It is a giant ice skate, of the type that strap on over your shoes. They match the ice skates that the guy with the bow-thingy is wearing.