#leon davent

[artschoolglasses]

Achilles Removing Patroclus' Body from the Battle, Leon Davent after Giulio Romano, 1547

[ducissatenebrarum]

Leon Davent  

Christ in Limbo

[magictransistor]

Léon Davent after Francesco Primaticcio. Cadmus Fighting the Dragon. 1545.

[museumdogs]

Léon Davent French, active 1540–1556, after Luca Penni Italian, 1500/1504–1556 Capital Sins series 1547 Etchings and engravings British Museum

Gula (Gluttony) 31.6 x 46.5 cm http://tinyurl.com/l7bp9jq

Detail from Gula 27.0 x 29.5 cm http://tinyurl.com/l5bth2y

Detail from Gula 9.9 cm diameter http://tinyurl.com/mrwfdav

Detail from Avaritia (Avarice) 10 cm diameter http://tinyurl.com/q7bjfrd

Invidia (Envy) 31.8 x 46.2 cm http://tinyurl.com/p7dd5vo

Detail from Invidia 27.0 x 29.9 cm http://tinyurl.com/mpfbll3

Museum Dogs is finishing out the week with some allegorical dogs in more etchings by Léon Davent and Luca Penni. (Check out Davent’s previous work at http://museumdogs.tumblr.com/tagged/Leon-Davent and Penni’s at http://museumdogs.tumblr.com/tagged/Luca-Penni.)

Luca Penni was one of the Italian artists working at the palace of Fontainebleau in the mid-sixteenth century. The French king Francis I had assembled artists and craftsmen there to decorate the palace, and a particular artistic style, which drew on Mannerism, developed at Fontainebleau. Penni is recorded has having been at Fontainebleau in the late 1530s, but after the original artistic director, Rosso Fiorentino, died and Francesco Primaticcio took over in 1540, Penni left Fontainebleau. After about 1547 he lived and worked mostly in Paris, producing religious, allegorical, mythological, and historical paintings, as well as portraits. Léon Davent, who was another Fontainebleau alum, continued to make etchings of Penni’s designs after they left the palace. Penni also published prints and may even have worked on some etchings himself. Among his possessions when he died were the eight copper plates etched by Davent and used to print the Seven Capital Sins series.[1]

The seven capital sins, also known as the seven cardinal or deadly sins, are the basic sins from which all others originate. The sins (with links to full images of the Davent/Penni etchings) are:

Gula (Gluttony)

Invidia (Envy)

Lussuria (Lust) http://tinyurl.com/m8ynj3a

Ira (Wrath) http://tinyurl.com/ovsvdad

Superbia (Pride) http://tinyurl.com/n7gxowg

Avaritia (Avarice) http://tinyurl.com/pzhv6xl

Pigritia (Sloth) http://www.spamula.net/blog/i41/ld11.jpg

And the frontispiece to the set is Justitia (Justice), http://tinyurl.com/l4eyxht.

The plate for each sin consists of a large central tondo (circular image) flanked by four smaller tondi containing other images relevant to the sin.

Seven of the eight plates were etched by Davent after designs by Penni around 1547, but the plate for Sloth and some of the plate for Lust were done by the same anonymous artist. Two different impressions of the set of etchings are known, one a little darker because of additional burin (the etching tool) work. That set, though, does not include Sloth and Lust.[2]

. . .

Dogs have been associated with negative qualities since antiquity, and those associations were perpetuated in Medieval and Renaissance art. Among the seven cardinal sins, dogs are usually associated with lust, avarice, wrath, and envy.  In ancient Greece, dogs were seen as having a licentious nature and thus were associated with sexual immorality. The Greeks even called prostitutes kuon—dogs. The Roman writer Pliny characterized the dog as a quarrelsome animal—they bark and fight over scraps. And Medieval sources, particularly Flemish ones, made dogs symbols of treachery and persecution (from Psalm 22, “dogs are all around me”). The biblical proverb about dogs returning to their vomit (Proverbs 26:11) equates the dog to the sinner who keeps sinning, and the image also suggests gluttony. Indeed, dogs’ general devotion to food makes them ideal representatives of that sin.[3] Dogs even got a bad rap because of their owners’ behavior. Little lap dogs were associated with vanity because wealthy women were often the ones to keep them as pets, and of course women are inherently frivolous and sinful beings. Also, moralists condemned little pet dogs because their owners fed and doted on the dogs instead of giving food and attention to the poor. (Surely a person can do both!)

No doubt much of the anti-dog sentiment in European culture of yore stems at least in part from the dim view of dogs presented in the Bible. A keyword search for "dog" yields almost entirely negative passages. Except for the neutral treatment of a dog in the book of Tobit, dogs in the Bible are presented as dirty, scavenging, eaters of carrion, and among the lowest forms of life. See for yourself: http://tinyurl.com/pbkpyjh.

For all the negative attributes heaped on dogs in art and literature throughout the centuries, there have always been people who love dogs and who have treated them well. Examples of tombs and elegiac poems for pet dogs can be found from at least as far back as ancient Roman times, and dogs accompany humans in portraits and appear in no particularly bad light in countless paintings. And amid all the deleterious symbolism, dogs have also represented faithfulness, vigilance, and loyalty.

Anyway, on to dogs and the cardinal sins in Davent’s and Penni’s series of etchings.

Gula Dogs are pretty universally known as being obsessed with food, so it is no surprise that dogs are associated with the sin of gluttony. One of the more common images, as in today’s etchings, is a dog lapping up an overindulgent human’s vomit. The origin for such an image, aside from artists’ real-life experience, is likely the bible verse Proverbs 26:11, "Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly." In Penni’s and Davent’s depiction of gluttony, the focus is on drinking to excess rather than eating. Indeed, anti-tavern sentiment was rife in the sixteenth century (indeed, when was it not?), and the image condemns both excessive drinking and taverns as places of immorality.[4]

The central tondo depicts a group of rowdy and grotesque men gathered around a table laden with food and wine, eating and drinking and carousing with abandon. Down front, a man slumps at the table and vomits on the floor; a dog laps it up with pleasure. It is true: dogs are gross. (Allie Brosh, of the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, better than any other artist sums up dogs’ attitude toward vomit, namely their own: http://tinyurl.com/28na9kl.) Under the table, two other dogs fight over some bones. Food aggression is a problem; those dogs need some serious socialization and training! A fourth dog sits in front of one of the carousers, being So Very Good in hopes that the man will give her some food. The man, however, holds up a goblet of wine, so perhaps the dog is supposed to be begging for booze, further adding to the debauchery of the scene. With meat on the table, though, a dog would surely be interested in that rather than stupid old wine. If my own dog’s behavior is any indication, the dog in the etching is probably just so excited that the humans are sitting at a table and eating that she does not care what it is on the table, she just wants some of it.

The bottom left auxiliary tondo repeats the image of the puking man and the dog. Penni must have particularly liked that one, for whatever reason.

Avaritia Dogs appear in one of the auxiliary tondi in the etching of Avaritia. Those tondi “are specifically directed at the egotistical accumulation of wealth for its own sake by merchants of the middle class.”[5] In the upper right one, a wealthy man counts his money while a poor beggar, coded as Lazarus from the biblical parable, languishes in poverty and misery outside. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (John 16: 19-31) begins:

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores."[6]

Lazarus and the rich man both die; Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man to hell. The rich man sees Lazarus by Abraham's side and begs for Lazarus to give him some water, but Abraham tells him that he's out of luck—he should have been generous to the poor while he was alive. Now he's stuck in hell without respite for eternity.

I like to interpret the dogs’ role in that parable in a positive light: When no other person will bother with Lazarus, the dogs go to comfort him, for they do not care about a human’s social station. And a dog’s licks have been said to heal wounds, like in the story of Saint Rocco, so the pups in the parable are actually helping Lazarus.

The direct inspiration for the image of Lazarus in Davent’s and Penni’s etching is one of the illustrations from a 1498 edition of Sebastian Brant’s  Ship of Fools:

Attributed to the Haintz-Nar-Meister Of Useless Death Woodcut from Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera Navis (Basel: Johann Bergmann, 1498) University of Houston Libraries Digital Collections http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/p15195coll15/item/29

The dogs in the etching, though, are delineated in a more refined way, and they appear heathier and happier than the dogs in the woodcut. Lazarus, too, looks happy. The dogs are glad to be licking Lazarus’s leg, and he seems to be enjoying it. Dog licks really tickle, so if nothing else, Lazarus is laughing at that. They might be scruffy street dogs, but they are faithful companions to the ailing Lazarus. So says Museum Dogs, regardless of the original artist’s intentions!

Invidia The main image of Invidia is pretty wild. Envy has nearly always been personified as female, and, as Penni/Davent present her, usually old, thin and wiry, with deflated, hanging breasts. (She often accompanied by a similarly scraggly dog, but not in this image.) In the etching, she has lightning bolts or flames her hands and a snake in her mouth. Two demons torture her while a third—or maybe the Devil himself—swoops by with a pitchfork. All of this takes place at the mouth of hell, which pours forth flames and smoke. Guarding the gate, as he does in classical mythology, is the three-headed dog Cerberus. His heads arenjust visible above the bottom frame of the image. Wild-eyed and with mouths agape, Cerberus is very worked up by the goings-on around him. (The entrance to the underworld seems to be much quieter in the Greek myths; the Christian version is the more frightening one by far.)

Cerberus has appeared on Museum Dogs a number of times, and the opinion around here is that even though he is a fearsome creature, he is at heart a sad, mistreated, and Misunderstood Dog. Read through http://museumdogs.tumblr.com/tagged/cerberus for more on that theme.

To the left of the image, the skeleton of some unlucky quadruped lays on a cliff at the edge of the abyss. Crows and a couple of dogs—in their biblical role as scavengers—pick at the carcass. (To put yet another positive spin on dogs’ position in the scene, remember that scavengers are very useful. Without them, the world would be littered with dead animals slowly decomposing. It is the scavengers who put the flesh to good use as food and, in doing so, help to keep the world a little tidier.)

The image in the top right tondo is taken from one of the fables of Aesop (dogs don’t make out so well in those stories, either) that deals with envy, that of the dog in the manger:

A dog lay in a manger, and by his growling and snapping prevented the oxen from eating the hay which had been placed for them. ‘What a selfish Dog!’ said one of them to his companions; ‘he cannot eat the hay himself, and yet refuses to allow those to eat who can.’[7]

The dog in the tondo is a skinny and irate fellow. I can’t excuse this one’s behavior. Bad Dog! Let the poor ox eat in peace! Perhaps, with training and guidance, the dog will chill out and learn to not grudge the ox his hay. 

Yes, we here at Museum Dogs are obiviouly biased when it comes to Man’s Best Friend. Yes, dogs can be disgusting and troublesome, but they as animals cannot be expected to follow human morality. The Medieval and Renaissance anti-canine moralizers were just mean and wrong about dogs!

. . .

For a full discussion of Penni’s and Davent’s Capital Sins etchings, read Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier’s article “Sebastian Brant: The Key to Understanding Luca Penni's Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins,” in The Art Bulletin from June 1996. It is availble on JSTOR. If you don’t have an account or are not attached to an institution with one, you can sign up for a MyJSTOR account, which allows you to read articles online. It’s free and totally worth doing. 

 Notes _________________________

1. Suzanne Boorsch, et al., The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), p. 91, http://tinyurl.com/mucryvr.

2. British Museum, "Capital Sins: Justice," museum number 1851,0208.158, object entry, http://tinyurl.com/nngtpmc.

3. Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2008), pp. 136–137, 212–213, http://tinyurl.com/luujsuo.

4. Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Sebastian Brant: The Key to Understanding Luca Penni's Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 2 (June 1996), p. 248.

5. Wilson-Chevalier, p. 244

6. John 16: 19-21, Bible Gateway, http://tinyurl.com/n7soa4m.

7. Attributed to Aesop, “The Dog in the Manger,” George Fyler Townsend, trans., www.gutenberg.org/files/21/21-h/21-h.htm#link2H_4_0031.