Wednesday 18 September 2024

Sacred and Profane

Michael A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 25:

The acceptance of a mixture of the high and the low in Christian art means that you can come across what might seem to be obscenities or indecencies in the most surprising of places. The printers ornament on the first page of the first edition of Erasmus's Greek and Latin New Testament shows a woman with her legs wide apart, revealing all she's got. A learned attack on Erasmus by Lopis Stunica sports a printers’ ornament with a mannequin-pisse on one side and, on the other, a woman copiously, vigorously and vividly breaking wind. Are such things so routine that compositors set them up without a second thought, or is there a conscious mixture of the grossly earthly and the highly spiritual?