Well, if it’s 16 October, it must be… YES, THAT’S RIGHT! The 470th anniversary of the death of Lucas Cranach the Elder, who once created this image of two men putting out the fire and brimstone of a papal bull with their farts.
It’s a woodcut (I think) known as The Papal Belvedere. The Latin means something like “The Pope speaks: Our sentences are to be feared, even if unjust”, to which the response is: “Be damned! Behold, o furious race, our bared buttocks. Here, Pope, is my ‘belvedere’.”
(There’s a Villa Belvedere in the Vatican, dating back to 1484, and belvedere means ‘beautiful view’.)
Cranach was mates with Martin Luther, and the illustration comes from one of Luther’s books which had a pop at the Pope. Cranach also did The Papal Ass.
…and The Pope is Adored as an Earthly God, in which a man shits in the papal tiara. I am given to understand that neither man was altogether in favour of Catholicism.
In other exciting book-and-baring-of-body-parts news, it’s also 31 years since Eileen Godfrey of Nashua, New Hampshire, discovered there was a side view of a naked breast in a Where’s Wally jigsaw.
Before her five-year-old and 10-year-old could complete the jigsaw and be corrupted for ever by the sight of a cartoon nipple, their mother spotted the offending object and took the puzzle away. She phone the store and complained, and they took the rest off their shelves.
Obviously, this then made the papers — including the following day’s Sun Journal, in which the president of the Great American Puzzle Factory cheerfully announced that two people complained in 1991, too.
The same thing led to a separate story in the Toledo Blade the following March when a 10-year-old on Long Island spotted it, too, told his mum, and pronounced it disgusting, but not until after he’d shown his seven-year-old brother.
the original Where’s Waldo? collection spent much of the 1990s occupying the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Challenged Books, just behind Howard Stern’s Private Parts.
…and that’s actually true.
Where’s Wally creator Martin Handford has never commented publicly on the great and terrible scandal, but later editions of the book (and presumably jigsaw) have made the scene slightly less Carry On Camping.
