This is post #3 in the series. Click here for part one and here for part two. Pro tip: click on any picture in this series to find out more about it.
Fun cocktail party fact: the word for drunkenness in ancient Greek is methe (pronounced méth-ee).
Actually, you already knew that. How?
Because it – or rather "she," since the noun is grammatically feminine – shows up in English in the words crystal meth and amethyst. (An amethyst is the gemstone you wear to keep the lady at bay.)
Methe was never really an official goddess in ancient Greece, but since people do “worship” her, Greek artists thought she made a great allegory. What's more, that allegory works in two ways, since (like “drunkenness” in English) methe can mean either intoxication (getting drunk) or addiction (alcoholism).
In The Art of Drinking, Obsopoeus exploits that ambiguity at several points, especially in the teaser he ends book one with:
The next book depicts the haunting portraits and problems of Drunkenness, composed by me in classical verse. You, binge drinker, who are constantly getting hammered, look at them as if you were looking in a mirror, and see how truly disgraceful the sight is! Once you’ve seen Drunkenness, you should turn and run from her for all your life, if you love the glory of true sobriety.
As he repeatedly says, Obsopoeus thinks getting buzzed or tipsy is okay, but getting drunk--hammered, blitzed--is wrong. It's a distinction worth bearing in mind.
Moreover, in speaking of "portraits" here, Obsopoeus means what he says literally, but in a totally surprising way.
He starts book two by referring to Apelles, one of the greatest of the "old master" painters of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. Think Raphael, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentilischi, and you're on the right track:
Among the paintings of Apelles—those monuments of old—that learnèd Greece celebrates in its writings, his ingenious hand left behind a masterpiece. It surpasses both the Venuses he created—the one of her emerging naked from the waves of the sea, and the other for the people of Kos that he only managed to get a start on. I’ll describe that picture, though its excellence outdoes my song and its precious art defeats my verses.
The picture at right is a Renaissance recreation by Titian of the first one of Apelles' lost paintings of Venus mentioned here, the "the Venus Anadyomene." He painted it around the year 1520, sixteen years before Obsopoeus wrote The Art of Drinking.
Apelles' other lost painting of Venus, the "Aphrodite of Kos," was also recreated in the Renaissance by Botticelli in the 1480s. I'm sure you've seen it:
Like Botticelli and Titian, Obsopoeus also wants to recreate a painting by Apelles. The difference is that instead of using pigments, he's going to use poetry.
In formal terms, Obsopoeus is going to give us an ekphrasis. That's the fancy term for a poet's attempt to outdo the beauty of a painting by describing that painting in beautiful language. It's an ancient and classical technique, and as a rule rather than exception, the poet's description ends up far more artificially alive and animated than any painting could ever be.
That's true here, too. Obsopoeus spends the next few hundred lines describing a painting you could call “The Garden of Drunkenness.” It's a sweeping allegory for people who cannot stop partying when the party is over.
The crazy thing is, though, no such painting by Apelles ever existed. Obsopoeus made the whole thing up, inspired (it seems) primarily by Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490–1510). That's the painting featured at the top of this post. Here's a wonderful short video introduction to the painting:
Like Bosch, Obsopoeus' "painting" shows us a green field filled with flowers and people. Unlike Bosch, his people are leisurely drinking wine at a festive gathering, and when the party's over, most of them get up and go home.
Others can't or won't, though. Instead, those people head for a walled garden in the center of the field. The garden is full of bad figures, like Hangover, Dementia, Self-Indulgence, Memory Loss, Depression, and a few others. And then--
Presiding in the center of the garden is a woman in royal raiment, drunk and surrounded by an entourage of women. A grassy garland’s encircling her styled hair, and she’s holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it. … As I studied these details, at first I thought the queen standing in their midst was Circe, but it wasn’t her. It was Drunkenness, labeled in Greek letters: Methe, Queen of all Wine-Drinkers.
This is a glass "phiale," or shallow wine bowl, from the time of Apelles (now in the Corning Museum of Glass in central New York).
By telling us that Methe is "holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it," Obsopoeus is doing something quite extraordinary.
To wit: at this central moment in his imaginary ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale, he’s alluding to a real ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale that once hung inside a shrine in Epidaurus, Greece -- and a famous one, to boot.
That painting was not by Apelles but by Pausias (4th c. BC), another old master of ancient Greece. And what made it so famous is that it depicted Methe drinking wine from a crystal phiale, with her face visible through the glass. Not an easy feat!
(Pausias’ painting is lost, but his idea was imitated in the late Renaissance by Annibale Caracci, long after Obsopoeus' death. That's it at left.)
I'll come back to this point in a minute.
Meanwhile, what happens in the Garden of Drunkenness? As you might guess, things go badly.
The people inside continue drinking until they pass out. They transform into animals -- sheep, pigs, donkeys, monkeys -- and when they wake up, they start vomiting or attacking each other in a wild frenzy.
Some try to escape the Garden, but they're met by an entourage of old women as they do. The women lash the people trying to leave; they handcuff the compliant ones and bludgeon the resisters, and ultimately enslave them all. Obsopoeus then tells us their names: Fever, Edema, Psoriasis, Poverty, Old Age, and, yes, Death. Yikes!
Obsopoeus' allegorical painting is haunting and glorious. It’s the climax of the whole poem, and clearly designed to be. Rather than go into more detail, though, I'd like to share related material with you that I didn't have room for in How to Drink.
In my last post, I quoted a “liminary” poem in Greek by the Renaissance scholar Joachim Camerarius. In fact, Camerarius wrote two Greek poems for Obsopoeus’ book, and I’m pleased to present the other one here. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and it's a fantastic specimen of how learned and playful Renaissance poetry can be.
It alludes to the Garden of Drunkenness by way of Pausias' painting, and you could call it Poetry is a Painted Crystal Bowl.
Like Obsopoeus, Camerarius is struck by the inherent competition between representing reality in the written word vs. the painter’s art. He heightens the similarity between those two arts by punning on the similarity of words used to describe each.
In his view, Obsopoeus’ written (engraphon) poetry is as beautifully, skillfully, and clearly executed as Pausias’ painted (graphike) crystal bowl because, through each one, you can discern the orderly rethe (features) of disorderly Methe (Drunkenness).
Here's the poem:
They say there was this one work of the painter’s art
by Pausias that was really worth seeing:
Drunkenness drinking from a glass phiale that she was tipping up
while facing forward, so that her whole face showed through,
and though the bowl covered her lips and eyes,
all her features were still quite clear.
Unquestionably, then, this—a painting like that—was a work of art.
But a greater work of art is the written one in your hands,
by our friend Vincent.
It has the gorgeous adornment of the Muses’ verses,
it teaches you how to drink a lot with understanding and without harm,
and it has found a system in an unsystematic business.
In it, not only will you be able to view Drunkenness,
you can consort with her, and with pleasure and understanding.
Here’s the Greek for those of you who can read it. I’ve highlighted and color coded the many words that correspond or pun on each other in each part of the simile:
Παυσΐεω τέχνης ἔργον τόδε φασὶ γενέσθαι
ἄξιον ἓν γραφικῆς, ὅ ττι μάλιστα θέας·
ἐξ ὑάλου πίνουσα Μέθη φιάλην ἐπέχουσα
ἀντία, φαίνεσθαι ὥστε πρόσωπον ἅπαν,
τῆς φιάλης τ’ ἐπιπροσθούσης χείλεσσι καὶ ὄσσοις,
εὔδηλ’ εἶναι ὅμως ὡς τάδε πάντα ῥέθη.
τεχνικὸν ὧδε γραφὲν—τίς δ᾿ οὔ φησ᾿;—ἦν ἄρα τοὖργον.
μᾶλλον δ᾿ ἐν χερσὶν τεχνικόν ἐστι τόδε
ἡμετέροιο φίλου Νικήτα’ ἔγγραφον ἔργον,
κόσμον ἔχον μέτρων πάγκαλον Ἀονίων·
πολλὰ πιεῖν ἀβλαβῶς μετ᾿ ἐπιστήμης τε διδάσκον,
καὶ λόγον εἰν ἀλόγῳ πράγματ᾿ ἐφευράμενον·
ἔνθαπερ εἰσιδέειν γε Μέθην δῆθ’ οὐ μονον ἔσται,
ἀλλὰ συνεῖν’ ἀυτῇ εὖ καὶ ἐπιστάμενως.
Notes in the Margin
Since this is a blog for poetry lovers, I thought I'd end with a liminary poem of my own I wrote for How to Drink -- one of a couple I wrote in Latin. (Yes, to say that's old fashioned and nerdy beyond belief is an understatement.) I composed them in the Baroque tradition, a tradition that's distinguished by all kinds of wordplay.
Here's a one-liner I'm especially proud of because it manages a pun on methe, method, and methodicus. Depending on how you analyze it, that last word can mean (1) "methodical" or (2) "who talks about methe." The meter is dactylic hexameter.
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