Classical Wisdom Litterae - November 2020

VI You see, book two begins with a magnificent allegory of alcoholism. Obsopoeus frames it as a hyper-animated description of a long-lost painting by Apelles, greatest of the Old Greek Masters: “Among the paintings of Apelles—those monuments of old—that learnèd Greece celebrates in its writings, his ingenious hand left behind a masterpiece. … I’ll describe that picture, though its excellence outdoes my song and its precious art defeats my verses.” And that’s exactly what he does. Obsopoeus spends the next few hundred lines describing an al legorical painting you could cal l The Garden of Drunkenness . It’s a sweeping story of people who cannot stop partying when the party is over, and it’s clearly the central masterpiece of the poem. It’s totally made up, though. As I wrote in the introduction to How to Drink : In fact, no such painting ever existed. In creating the haunting allegory of addiction and alcoholism that follows, Obsopoeus took inspiration f rom (1) Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490– 1510) and (2) Renaissance re-creations of paintings by Apelles. The latter include The Calumny of Apelles (1480s), which Botticelli re-created from a description of Apelles’ Allegory of Calumny in Lucian’s dialogue Slander, a Warning . That’s not wrong, but I should have left out Botticelli entirely. Obsopoeus was thinking of Lucian, and of a painting re-created from Apelles, but it wasn’t Botticelli’s. ( The Calumny of Apelles is a terrible title. It’s like The Apology of Socrates, where you can’t tell if Socrates is the author or not. (He isn’t-- Plato is). It’d be better to call the painting Apelles’ Calumny , because that’s what it’s supposed to be: a recreation of a lost allegorical painting by Apelles. By the way, slander comes from the Hellenistic Greek word skándalon , “trap.”) So, who was Apelles? Right: “The Victim,” detail from Boticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles , 1480s Detail of the Accused in Boticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles