The drolatic dreams of Pantagruel

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The Codex Quetzalecatzin, an Extremely Rare Colored Mesoamerican Manuscript, Now Digitized and Put Online a b c d Renner, Bernd (2014). "From Satura to Satyre: François Rabelais and the Renaissance Appropriation of a Genre". Renaissance Quarterly. 67 (2): 377–424. doi: 10.1086/677406. S2CID 193083885.

One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time completing a set of engravings for an 1866 English Bible. He probably could have stopped there and assured his place in posterity, but he would go on to illustrate an 1872 guide to London, a new edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and several more hugely popular works. Corey Arnold, whose cropped image of a raccoon in the middle of the street appears in our banner and he got all humpy about it. Rabelais has "frequently been named as the world's greatest comic genius"; [23] and Gargantua and Pantagruel covers "the entire satirical spectrum". [24] Its "combination of diverse satirical traditions" [24] challenges "the readers' capacity for critical independent thinking"; [24] which latter, according to Bernd Renner, is "the main concern". [24] It also promotes "the advancement of humanist learning, the evangelical reform of the Church, [and] the need for humanity and brotherhood in politics", [23] among other things.a b c Rabelais, François (1999). The Complete Works of François Rabelais: translated from the French by Donald M. Frame; with a foreword by Raymond C. La Charité. Translated by Donald M. Frame. University of California Press. p. 909. ISBN 9780520064010. Nothing derogatory is then in the use of “dream” in the title, nothing that would diminish the seriousness of the artistic purpose. On the contrary, this dream reveals us a reality which is hidden by daytime appearances, and which escapes the constraints of socially correct discourse, language and logic. This dream offers us a glimpse into the continuous flow of the unexpected associations between the objects and the elements of the language, into a deeper layer of reality which makes more complete our understanding of the world. The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne, [6] and, within a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it. [7] You can see a great many of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel at Wikimedia Commons. The simultaneous extravagance and repugnance of the series’ medieval France may seem impossibly distant to us, but it can hardly have felt like yesterday to Doré either, given that he was working three centuries after Rabelais. On Tool Island, the people are so fat they slit their skin to allow the fat to puff out. At the next island they are imprisoned by Furred Law-Cats, and escape only by answering a riddle. Nearby, they find an island of lawyers who nourish themselves on protracted court cases. In the Queendom of Whims, they uncomprehendingly watch a living-figure chess match with the miracle-working and prolix Queen Quintessence.

A thoroughly multicultural project avant la lettre, the Florentine Codex (named for the Medici family library in Florence, where it was sent upon its completion) has only just become accessible to a wide online readership. Though it’s “been digitally available via the World Digital Library since 2012, for most users it remained impenetrable because reading it requires knowledge of sixteenth-century Nahuatl and Spanish, and of pre-Hispanic and early modern European art traditions.” By offering searchable text in modern versions of both those languages as well as English — to say nothing of its browsable sections organized by people, animals, deities, and even by Nahuatl terms like coyote and tortilla — the Digital Florentine Codex re-illuminates an entire civilization.There is no main text, just a preface wherein publisher Richard Breton writes that “the great familiarity I had with the late François Rabelais has moved and even compelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the drolatic dreams of the very excellent and wonderful Pantagruel.” Yet, as Green explains, “the book’s wonderful images are very unlikely to be the work of Rabelais himself — the attribution probably a clever marketing ploy.” You can view these amusing and grotesque images at the Public Domain Review, and in the context of the book as preserved at the Internet Archive. “Be warned,” says Intriguing History, the artist “seems to enjoy the use of a lot of phallic imagery, along with frogs, fish and elephants.” But who is the artist? Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Breton’s decision to resist the urge to add any text to the images was a more serious and complex one than it seems. Note that we are in a world which fervently wanted to exploit the multimedia potential of the union of picture and text both as a mean of persuasion and as that of the ars memorandi, fixing things in the memory. The fundamental model of this combination was the emblem with its threefold structure where the central pictura was encircled by an inscriptio and a subscriptio, and with its established habits of reading. For a publisher it was therefore difficult to avoid the addition of some text. All the images are from The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel (1565), published by Richard Breton in Paris.The book comprises 120 woodcuts which Breton claimed were the works of Francois Rabelais, although this is almost certainly not the case.A more likely creator for “the most curious pictures that can be found in the whole world” is the engraver Francois Desprez.Whatever their origin, the images remain startling to this day.