SOURCES
Anonymous Flemish Satirical Diptych, c. 1520 oil on panel 58.5 x 44 cm. ‘The Netherlands and Italy abounded in … pithy proverbs, all to the effect that money and dirt are the same; these found pictorial form in the work of Breugel and Bosch. But when placed, as at San Gimignano, in the specific context of Hell, the use of excrement as torture becomes a brilliant parody of the use of gold as symbol of divine light in Heaven, and one of the more striking examples of the system of inverted correspondences which existed in Christian imagery between Heaven and Hell.' - Robert Hughes, Heaven & Hell in Western Art
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Taddeo di Bartolo Hell, c. 1320 Fresco in Collegiate Church of San Gimignano
In medieval depictions of Hell ‘… a punishment often visited upon userers, misers and the avaricious … are forced to eat excrement, either their own or (as in Taddeo di Bartolo’s Hell in San Gimignano) a devil’s. Now there is an essential and primitive connection between faeces and money. A baby’s fascination with (their) own excrement is, as child psychologists never tire of pointing out, possessive; the child wants to keep the first substance (they are) conscious of producing. Presumably this kind of childhood experience lay behind Bacon’s celebrated apothegm, “Money be like muck, no good unless it be spread” - Robert Hughes, Heaven & Hell in Western Art ‘He shits on the world (he despises the world)’ detail from Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’, 1559. Interpretation given by Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, page 35-7; Breugel The Complete Paintings, Taschen,1994 |
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