Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities) by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose [Prose, Francine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195156997

Your mama is so fat she had to be baptized in Sea World. Your mama is so fat that when she goes out to eat, she looks at the menu and says, "okay. "

Along with lust, gluttony is perhaps the most easily depicted, the most visual of the deadly sins. How much simpler it is for the painter to show the glutton at his overloaded table, surrounded by an overabundance of food, than it is to show the more interior, more purely psychological failings of the envious or the proud.

By the late Middle Ages, gluttony had become a theme on which the artist was encouraged to let his imagination run wild. As always, the fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch ran considerably wilder than those of his contemporaries or his successors.

In Bosch's painting The Last Judgment, the gluttons have become food, doomed by one of hell's heavy-handed ironies: the eaters are being eaten. In the background, a stew of sinners-with the upturned faces of baby birds and the rapt looks of the newly baptized-is burbling in a giant cauldron over a roaring fire. So much for the soup course! In the foreground are two demons who could pass for elderly grandmas, except the one in the black babushka has a bird's legs for arms and a giant swollen belly, and the other old dame in a wimple has a lizard's feet. The creature in the wimple holds a large saute pan in which we can discern a man's head, his hand, and one leg up to his knee. He is gazing directly at us, and he doesn't look happy. Beside the pan are two eggs. Are we going to have an omelet? How nicely it will go with the filet of the naked man, who is lying there, trussed, his hands crossed modestly over his genitals; his demeanor is strangely placid considering he's attached to a spit with a horrifyingly convincing and lovingly rendered rotisserie feature. You can see the mechanism, exactly how it would turn. Meanwhile Babushka douses the man from a little saucier, presumably to tenderize and flavor the final product.

Brueghel's vision of gluttony is nearly as energetic but notably less sadistic than Bosch's. Except for Brueghel's rendering of Lust, which delivers a succession of small shocks each time you look closely enough to see what people are actually doing with their hands, their genitals, and their bodies, Gluttony (Gula, or Throat) is the most animate of the series of drawings (to be later used for engravings) in which he depicted the seven deadly sins. The caption across the bottom of Brueghel's design warns, "Shun drunkenness and gluttony, because excess makes man forget God and himself." Surely, the monsters of gluttony in this demonic landscape have their minds (or what's left of their minds) on all manner of things instead of their Heavenly Father.

At yet another round table are two naked women. One is draining a jug of wine while the second sprawls wantonly and shamelessly across the lap of a nearly faceless man.

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