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. In his “Philosophical Dictionary”, Voltaire said the crucifix went overboard “near the island of Baranura, which I am inclined to think was the island of Barataria”. I found another website that called the “nearby” turf Baramurah Island.

Baranura is someone (or something) on Facebook, but not an island. Barataria is a place in Trinidad & Tobago and in Louisiana, and in Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, it’s an island that Sancho Panza was awarded as a prank (barato in Spanish means “cheap”). Barataria is also the republican kingdom in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers”.

Baramurah is someplace in India, but it could have been an Indonesian island — the words have something to do with selling coal, possibly cheap. The Catholic Asian News says the landfall was on Seram Island in Indonesia, one of the Moluccas.

At any rate, the storm abated, and when Francis and company strolled onto the beach, what Voltaire called “the pleasantest of his miracles” took place: A crab came out of the sea and sidled up to Francis … holding his crucifix!

What a great, albeit stupid, story!

For one thing, Seram, or Ceram, is no sandbar of an islet — it’s 17,000 square kilometres. The crab must have known exactly where the boats landed. Either that or it was … a miracle.

The main benefit, however, of having come across the painting above — by Francesco Solimena (1657-1747) — is that I found out so much more about Francis Xavier and, believe me, the crab ain’t even half of it, though it refuses to sidle away.

Malacca is evidently home today to a species of crab that has a cross among the markings on its shell. The tourism website unhelpfully refers to them as “St Francis Xavier’s crabs”, and a Web search for something a little more scientific produces nothing — except for yet another contradiction.

You see the cross on the shell, right? Some wag’s given the crab a crucifix to hold.

According to the Catholic Asian News, these same marked crabs also live in Goa, and they command the same reverence among Catholics living on the shore there, who believe they (the crabs, not the Catholics) are descended from Francis’ original clawed courier, which, since it was blessed by the missionary, is a holy crustacean.

How its offspring migrated all the way from Indonesia to India they don’t care. “Faith has no geographical limits,” Father Saturnino Mascarenhas of Goa archdiocese told the Catholic Asian News.

The shell markings have “nothing to do with religious myths”, Anil Chateerjee of the National Institute of Oceanography argued with the Catholic Asian News, though he admitted he’s never seen this particular crab, a factor that may or may not be relevant.

The logo of the Society of Saint Francis Xavier, a student group at Georgetown University.

“In all probability, the cross on the crabs existed before the event with Xavier,” Jesuit historian Father Moreno de Souza conceded to the Catholic Asian News.

But God created these crabs because he’d already planned on Xavier losing his cross and getting it back, 18-year-old Goan Wajtyla de Sa insisted to the Catholic Asian News. “This is not an accident.”

“I know that these are crabs blessed by Xavier, but he didn’t say not to eat them,” Goa fisherman Peter Alcantro told the Catholic Asian News as he melted some butter.

I’ll give the final word to Father Nicholas Luis, “a vocation promoter”. There are pictures and paintings, and lately even comic books, linking the crab with the saint, he told the Catholic Asian News. “It is up to the believer to decide, and for scientists to further examine the alleged phenomenon of crabs bearing these cross marks.”

This specimen’s cross is extraordinarily refined.

Francis Xavier got his crucifix back thanks to divine marine life, but it doesn’t seem to have done him a great deal of good (unless you count becoming a saint).

Having been ordered to the East Indies by Portugal’s king, specifically to clean up the colony in Goa, Francis spent three years getting the flock back in the right pasture, thumbing his nose at Hinduism all the while, and then, in 1544, he did missionary work among the Paravas pearl fishers off India’s southeast coast, living in a cave.

He carried on to Ceylon and then Malacca, abandoned a plan for lack of a ship to get to Macassar, stayed briefly on Ambon Island, Seram’s little sister, then other Maluku Islands. The little adventure with the crab came somewhere in here.

Guide to Francis Xavier World

Then it was back to Ambon and Malacca, where a Japanese fugitive from the law named Anjiro, accused of murder, agreed to serve as his tour guide back home. Francis was pushing meanwhile for the Inquisition to be imported to Goa.

With Anjiro, Francis sailed via Malacca and Canton to Japan, staying there from mid-1549 through spring 1551. The following year he set out to fulfill a vow to convert China, which was still closed to foreigners. He got only as near as Sancian Island (now Shangchuan), 14 kilometres off the Guangdong coast … and died, on December 2, 1552.

A priceless Da Vinci Crab

A Chinese convert arranged his burial, lining the coffin with lime to bare the bones quickly. When the captain of the Santa Cruz, which had brought Francis this far, had the remains inspected three months later ready for the return to India, there had been no decay at all.

The ship reached Malacca in March 1553 and Francis was buried again, in a rock-cut grave. Five months later an old “friend” showed up wanting to see the body and dug him up in the middle of the night. There had been no decay at all.

Recognising a miracle when he saw one, the old pal stashed the remains and let the Viceroy of Goa know. Francis was summoned home.

Catch of the day: The Common Warhol Crab

The body arrived in Goa in March 1554 and was put on display for three days at the College of St Paul. In 1556 two separate medical examinations of the corpse confirmed there had still been no decay at all. A wound in Francis’ side was still moist with blood. A witness noted “a wonderful and sweet odour”.

In 1613 they moved Francis to the Basílica do Bom Jesus (Basilica of Good Jesus). The following year the Society of Jesus had his right arm severed at the elbow and shipped to Rome. Blood gushed out, but within a decade only bone was left.

In 1619, the rest of the arm was cut off for ogling purposes in Japan, and pieces of the shoulder blade went to Cochin, Malacca and Macao. In 1636 they cut out the internal organs and parsed them out among believers elsewhere. There still had been no decay at all.

The Op Art Crab (This one’s real.)

Canonisation came in 1622, and what was left of the body was placed in a silver casket in a purpose-built mausoleum for permanent display. By 1700, however, the remains were no longer holding up, so they locked the coffin — except for, since 1759, a ritual parading of the relics once every 10 years. The last “Exposition” in 2004 drew two million gawkers. Visible in a glass case that is not hermetically sealed, Francis still looks pretty good.

In 1953 a marble statue of St Francis Xavier was erected in front of the St Paul’s Church in Macau, where he’d preached, and later a large tree fell on it, breaking off the right arm — not a coincidence, they say, but another miracle.

In the Chapel of the Royal Palace in Madrid, meanwhile, Francis’ original crucifix is on view — it bears the scratches of the crab’s claws.

You can watch a quaint little film about Francis Xavier and the crab here on YouTube. For a glimpse of the saint himself, in 1994 and not looking too bad considering, see this video, but you really ought to turn off the sound.

Jesus of the Crab Nebula

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.

To be sure, the great masterpieces and the scandals they provoked were long behind Courbet. “After Dinner at Ornans” was two decades in the past, “Funeral at Ornans” was 1850, and “The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” 1854.

The impact of “The Bathers” had worn off soon after a snippy Napoleon III whacked it with his riding crop in 1853, as had the grandiose unveiling of “The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up My Seven Years as an Artist” in 1855. “Origin of the World”, his gynaecological study from 1866, was squirreled away in some lusty sultan’s palace.

So, no longer Europe’s most radical artist, Courbet had gone to fashionable Trouville “for three days and stayed for three months”, as he put it, dodging the Parisian cholera, bathing in the sea and painting it alongside James Abbott McNeil Whistler — and getting over his constipation to boot. (This sort of factoid is why artists’ letters are archived for posterity, or possibly posteriority. You can see some of Courbet’s correspondence here courtesy of Google Books.)

Trouville reminded him why he’d fallen in love with the sea on first sight, at age 22 on a visit to nearby Le Havre. “We have at last seen the horizonless sea,” he wrote to his parents. “How strange it is for a valley dweller. You feel as if you are carried away; you want to take and see the whole world.”

Decades later Trouville still charmed him, though in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, “The countryside is not very beautiful,” he wrote his sisters. “As for the beach, it is nothing special … a bit far and bare”.

As for the surf, it’s reportedly calmer there than elsewhere along the coast, but Courbet was in Saint-Aubin long enough to see storms churn it. If he wasn’t such a stickler about realism, metaphor might be read into his “landscapes of the sea”, the turbulence a signal of the political upheavals of the era, which would soon sweep him up.

Symbolism would be nice. Even Courbet said of the sea, in a letter to Victor Hugo in 1864, “In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”

And Paul Cezanne would one day say that a Courbet wave “seems to hit you full in the chest, you stagger back, the whole room reeks of sea spray.”

Ultimately Courbet had the call, however, and he insisted that he always painted real life just the way it was.

“Do not expect a symbolic work,” Emile Zola agreed in a Salon review. “Courbet has simply painted a wave.”

“La Trombe”, the painting at the top of this post and seen a bit more closely below, was done that summer of 1867. Sotheby’s sold it last month for $566,500. That’s real money!

Interestingly, Courbet has again placed a human figure in the midst of grand nature, as he did years earlier in his far more famous “Seacoast at Palavas”, only this time it’s a woman. In the 1854 painting, done at what is now called Palavas-les-Flots on the Mediterranean coast, the figure was almost certainly him, although many people argue it’s his friend Alfred Bruyas.

If it’s Courbet on the beach at Palavas, it certainly makes for a more interesting storyline. There he was, at the top of his game, “the most arrogant man in France”, to use his own assessment. “Oh, sea!” he claimed to have taunted the Mediterranean, “your voice is tremendous, but it will never succeed in drowning out the voice of fame as it shouts my name to the whole world!”

It was another measure of the strident, independent rebel who honoured few people besides himself and left history no fewer than 20 self-portraits, including the wild-eyed Johnny Deppe of “Despair” from a decade earlier and the cocky one shown here (a close-up), “Self-portrait with Pipe”, from about 1849.

“Seacoast at Palavas” — which also goes by the titles “The Artist on the Seashore at Palavas”, “The Edge of the Sea at Palavas”, “The Sea at Palavas” and “The Beach at Palavas” and is now at the National Gallery of Australia — was the exuberant result of finally seeing the briny expanse again for the first time in too long a while, on a sidetrip from an 1854 visit to Bruyas’ home in Montpellier, which is in turn not far from storied Avignon and Arles.

Palavas in 1997 opened the Art Gallery Gustave Courbet on Quai Clemenceau, which the town’s website seems to suggest is where Courbet did indeed have his lodgings, “in the extension of the casino”. He evidently did well by seashore casinos. But it’s Montpellier that has the Musée Fabre, where the self-portrait with the pipe hangs.

There’s also the Courbet Walk, on which seven stelas mark scenes he painted in Montpellier and Pavalas.

In 1865 Whistler offered a different Courbet of the coast, a view from Trouville that he titled “Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville”, no doubt to drag the viewer’s intention away from the subject matter and into the technique, just as he did with his mother’s portrait (see this post). Here’s a close-up of “Harmony”, now at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:

Whistler didn’t see a fiery rebel mocking Neptune, but a mere human all but faded into the circumstances of his existence. And so it was quickly becoming with Gustave Courbet. Within six years he allowed himself to be drawn into the experimental mud of the Paris Commune, and the handwriting of doom was on the wall.

In the spring of 1871 Courbet was part of the bureaucracy and basically in charge of art in the capital. Soon after the authorities’ hammer came down on the Commune late in May, he was arrested, flagellated in the court of public opinion, chained up and led through the streets to prison. It wasn’t the picnic that his admirer Claude Monet had invited him to for “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe” half a decade earlier, as seen in the detail below.

On Courbet’s release the following year he was put through the legal wringer again. He had ordered the relocation of the “artless” Vendôme Column, the monument to the war-mongering Napoleon I, and ended up stuck with the bill for moving it. Rather than pay, he bolted to Switzerland, choosing La Tour-de-Peilz on the shore of Lake Geneva, a body of water that’s vast, but hardly sea-vast.

Amid pictures of funereal bouquets and trout dead on life’s cruel hooks, Courbet lasted another four dreary years in exile, running a studio of underlings who did all the painting for him so that he could sink ingloriously into a lake of brandy and absinthe. The booze was his coffin: he dropped dead of dropsy on December 31, 1877.

Waves never stop, nor the ripples caused by Courbet’s cagily inventive wrestling bouts with nature — and the nature of man.

“The Shore at Trouville: Sunset Effect” is at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. A closer look below:

“Paysage de la mer”, circa 1870, sold by the Manton Family Foundation in 2008 for $62,000, not what Christie’s was hoping for.

In 1869 Courbet sampled another Normandy resort, Etretat, where tall, brine-bored cliffs added to the aesthetic allure. There were more leaping waves than at Trouville, too.

He occupied the house of one of Guy de Maupassant’s relatives and whipped out 20 canvases (or 29, depending on who’s talking). “Did I earn my bread and butter in Etretat!” he boasted. Christie’s sold one of them, “La vague” (”The Wave”), for $574,500 in 1998. Some bread and butter!

There are many Courbet paintings called “The Wave” in different languages. The one above belongs to the Oskar Reinhart Collection at the Am Römerholz museum in Winterthur, Switzerland.

De Maupassant went to see him, and years later recalled his impressions of the proto-impressionist: “In a huge, empty room, a fat, dirty, greasy man was slapping white paint on a blank canvas with a kitchen knife. From time to time he would press his face against the window and look out at the storm.

“The sea came so close that it seemed to batter the house and completely envelope it in its foam and roar. The salty water beat against the windowpanes like hail, and ran down the walls. On his mantelpiece was a bottle of cider next to a half-filled glass. Now and then, Courbet would take a few swigs, and then return to his work. This work became ‘The Wave’, and caused quite a sensation around the world.”

Below, more of Courbet’s paysages de mer.

“The Calm Sea” from 1869, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

“The Wave”, 1870, at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin

“The Wave”, 1870, at the Phoenix Art Museum

“The Wave”, circa 1871, at the National Gallery of Scotland

There’s another rollicking “Wave” from 1870 at the Musée Orsay, where it’s alternatively titled “The Stormy Sea”, but they’ve let the photographer put his copyright on the online image! Well, that certainly keeps me from stealing it — and admiring it.

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?

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.