Dali House

“The Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier and the Crab” is yet another painting I stumbled across that made me wonder whether my Catholic education, with all its Bible indoctrination, was really worth wearing a crown of thorns for the rest of my life. Not that Saint Francis Xavier ever figured in the Bible, of course, but in school we did get the saintly virtues hammered into our skulls, so how did I miss out on the crab episode?

This wasn’t another case of censorship, as it was with Lot’s nocturnal escapades with his daughters (see this post). No, I suspect that I was never taught about Saint Francis Xavier’s crab because he (Francis, not the crab) is the hero of the Jesuits, and the priests who decided what I should know were Franciscans or Chicagoans or something.

Probably any Jesuit-schooled person, if he’s willing to admit that much, can tell you the crab incident occurred while Francis Xavier, a high-achieving Basque missionary, optimised paradigms-wise, was furthering his mission to show Asia what a fine fellow Jesus was, much better than Muhammad or the Buddha or any of those confusing Hindu gods.

Peter Paul Rubens’ “Miracles of St Francis Xavier” from 1617-18 is at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Plenty of healing and raising from the dead, but no crabs.

Having succeeded in transforming Goa on India’s west coast into a magnet for Western backpackers, Francis set sail for China in 1546. A storm came up en route to Malacca, which would become a state of Malaysia but at the time was a Portuguese outpost. The actual setting of this incident is, however, subject to a debate that would be better spent deciding whether female Catholic priests should be allowed to have abortions.

The first website Google pointed me to for an explanation of Francis and the crab was The Jesuit Gourmet, where contributor “Jhaw” relates the story and then whips up some Baked Eggplant Stuffed with Crab Meat. I’m not kidding.

“Jhaw” says Francis prayed to God to soothe the rollicking waves, and flung a cross into the water as a sacrifice. Sure enough, the storm abated.

Over at The Real Presence.org, Father John A Hardon (still not kidding) clarified that Francis didn’t toss a “cross” into the ocean, but a crucifix, so that helped.

Tourism Malacca.com quotes from “A Stroll Through Ancient Malacca” by Father Pintado to say that, no, Francis Xavier was in a small boat, just tooling around offshore, and was merely holding his crucifix over the water to calm the waves when he accidentally dropped it.

The Union of Catholic Asian News says people in Goa believe Francis was dipping his crucifix into the waves to settle them down, but it slipped from his grasp.

It’s a piddling point, but one of many disputed angles in the saga. See the rest.

Gustave Courbet’s “La Trombe” from 1867

Gustave Courbet came from Ornans, lodged thick in the hills of eastern France against the Swiss border, and after that toiled in Paris. He was 22 before he first laid eyes on the sea, but it grabbed him, as it will. He became a shoreline junkie.

In 1867, when Courbet was 58 and famous, his neighbourhood pharmacist, Monsieur Fourquet, invited him along to his summer house at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer on the Norman coast, spotted above on Google Earth.

Gustave and Zelie, one of the artist’s three sisters who’d long been his models, stayed for 10 days beginning on August 24. The other sisters, Zoe and Juliette, were left behind in sweltering Paris to keep an eye on his latest exhibition.

From the rise above the beach, Courbet painted “La Trombe” (”The Waterspout”), seen above.

And here, “La Plage de Saint-Aubin”, which has “1867″ written right on it but, according to at least one art historian, was done in 1865. Why Sarah Faunce thinks so, I don’t know, but she argues that Courbet often didn’t sign and date his work until it left his studio, and that was often a year or two after the painting was finished. In 2005 this piece sold at auction for $307,000.

In Trouville in 1865, another tide-minding village on the English Channel, Courbet had painted “Portrait of Countess Karoly”, a vacationing Hungarian royal. It was such a hit that visitors to the “splendid” seaview apartment that the local casino loaned him wouldn’t let him get on with his job.

“More than 400 ladies” came to see the “princess”, he wrote home (and perhaps to compare noses). They also offered him plenty more work — everyone now wanted her portrait done too, at 1,500 francs a pop. “I’ll paint another two or three to satisfy those who are most anxious.”

To be sure, noted travel journalist Adolphe Joanne, Trouville was “the meeting place of the sick who are perfectly healthy, it is Paris transported for two or three months to the sea coast, with its qualities, its absurdities and its vices … It is sad to say that most of the women go there to parade a senseless luxury.”

An aerial of Trouville showing the casino, the large building, still on the spin.

Also sweating it out back in Paris, his soon-to-be-former friend Jules Fleury-Husson — the art critic signed Champfleury — was moaning that Courbet had “lost his way” and was by now merely “trying to please”. Huge bodies of water do have a way of mellowing people out. See the rest.

Relax, kids, it’s only Granddad’s gas mask from the Great War!

Halloween was a lot more fun back in the olden days when they could make scary stuff out of such authentic materials as elephant ivory, not that the elephants ever raised any objection to plastic once it was invented.

This ivory model of a skull has a cylinder at the base that family physicians pushed to activate the eyes, tongue and lower jaw and demonstrate what was wrong with family members’ heads — and to scare the daylights out of everyone.

It’s one of those historical artefacts now regarded as grin-inducing curiosities, and is owned by Britain’s Science Museum, where every day is Halloween.

Once the 18th-century doctor had calmed his patients down again, he whipped out the wax vanitas seen below and popped off the abdominal lid, gave them a minute to catch their breath, and showed them which of their internal organs he was going to cut out with his scary knife.

Actually, the wax vanitas was a common device to signify the brevity of human existence. A model gravestone or an hourglass was even better at reminding you that, no matter how old you are, time’s nearly up.

Children fond of playing with sharp sticks might be more easily cautioned with this display. You see the point?

Werewolves! Seen ‘em with my own eyes!

Unless you read Russian, Alex Andreev may be destined to be one of those modern artists who thrives on cyber-fame, but on the strength of his images alone.

Someone, most likely the busy webmaster at the photo factory EnglishRussia.com, posted a pile of Andreev’s pictures and they went viral, but unfortunately no one’s been able or willing to produce more information about the artist or his technique.

Andreev’s very clever website is packed with creativity in several genres, but it’s resolutely in Russian, and who’s going to trust the online translators to tackle Russian when they can barely manage French?

The image titles are given in English at least, but not all of the images seen elsewhere are represented. So for now, all I know is that the title of the piece above is “Private Party”, and that Andreev does acknowledge a debt to Magritte.