Think Millennial Humor Is Bizarre? Check These 16th-Century Demonic Doodles
Edition #30 - The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel
Hello friends,
Thank you for being a valuable subscriber to my newsletter Pursuit. If you think this newsletter could be helpful to art [readers, thinkers, writers, students, and interpreters], please share my link.
Both free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is through a paid subscription.
Think Millennial Humor Is Bizarre? Check These 16th-Century Demonic Doodles
A grotesque image of an ogre shooting an arrow into another creature’s rear.
A nun plucks penises off a phallus tree.
A bizarre hybrid examining someone else’s hindquarters.
And rabbits conducting a funeral procession.
Medieval society wasn’t all about prayers and plagues. The printing press hadn’t been invented yet and the painstaking task of copying line after line of a medieval manuscript was performed by scribes. So how do you spice up the dull task?
The scribes added penis monsters, butts, poop, images of violent rabbits, and lots of vengeful animals in the marginalia of their manuscripts.
The grotesque marginalia aka drolleries became a safe haven for people to mock religious establishments and disagree with the political climate of that era.
During the renaissance, another illustrative book came into the picture— The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel, which chronicles the bizarre dreams of a giant monster Pantagruel, son of Gargantua.
In plain English, Drolactic means “amusing” or “funny”.
This book is speculated to be written by François Rabelais and edited by a Parisian editor Richard Breton. The illustrative manual consists of 120 woodcuts depicting a series of grotesque demons and monstrous figures.
Since this book had no text, people were free to give their own visual interpretations, simply by gauging the religious and political setup in that era.
Did this book attack the high-ranking cardinal priests and Catholic Church?
Did the demon doodles mock the wealthy noblemen?
or did these illustrations become a direct inspiration for painters like Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel?
Come, let’s explore the fantastical demons, tickle our creative instincts and try to analyze a few.
A straight face gentleman is drum beating. A doodle with an elephant trunk holds his shield and lance as if getting ready for a war.
Other armed nobility carries sword, helmet, bow and arrow.
Whoever the illustrator was, they made sure of the detailed dressing of these demonic doodles.
This doodle would need no further description. Visuals speak for themselves.
A clueless caricatured cardinal-priest. Notice the hat.
How about this? Does this resemble the crown worn by the popes of the Catholic Church?
To lighten your mood, here are the comical ones. An elephant with a tusk and gear, an animated barrel, and a humpty dumpty.
Here’s another one that resembles the painting The Ugly Duchess by Quentin Matsys.
This doodle might be a satirical representation of the women not dressing their age.
Either the illustrator was a fashionista or they intended to depict exquisite clothing of that era. Either way, it surely is unique.
A woman with a derby hat and a man with a cape and a hat slung like a bag.
I found these doodles really fascinating. What do you think about them? Tell me in the comments.
Before you go, here are my art musings on my YouTube channel.