Amphibian Creates Culture

Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man, in the Renaissance, was no headline to excite the public; Amphibian Creates Culture was something very far out of the ordinary.

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London: Collins & Brown, 1990), p. 99. This passage is repeated, almost verbatim, in Grafton’s ‘Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Annius of Viterbo’, in Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 76-103 (p. 76) and ‘Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo’ in The Transmission of Cultures in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, pp.8-38 (p. 8).