![]() ![]() He is the perfect metaphorical example of the human condition: longing for that which we cannot obtain, in his case touch and warmth. The snowman’s lot in life is complicated - he is immobile, explicitly impermanent, and confined to an existence of ruminating upon his fate. Santa Claus and the snowman became ubiquitous icons who soared hand-in-hand o’er the land of commodified Christmas kitsch.Ī snowman receives romantic advice from dog in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Stories for the Household” (1880s) (via Internet Archive Book Images) The snowman’s place in the traditional Christmas canon of jolly holiday diversions - along with ice-skating and horse-drawn sleighs - gained a higher status in the early Victorian era, when Prince Albert thrust his penchant for German holiday fun onto England. The Snowman Trick (1950), illustration by Luke Limner, Esq. Besides your typical sexually graphic and politically riled caricatures, the Belgian snowmen, Eckstein discovered, were often parodies of folklore figures, such as mermaids, unicorns, and village idiots. The Belgians rendered their anxieties into tangible, life-like models: a defecating demon, a humiliated king, and womenfolk getting buggered six ways to Sunday. Their snowmen embodied a dissatisfaction with the political climate, not to mention the six weeks of below-freezing weather. This event was uncovered by Eckstein in his The History of the Snowmanbook. In 1511, the townspeople of Brussels banded together to construct over 100 snowmen in a public art installation known as the Miracle of 1511. In the Middle Ages, building snowmen was a way for a community to find the silver lining in a horribly oppressive winter rife with starvation, poverty, and other life-threatening conditions. Women attacking a cop snowman in a 1937 painting by Hans Dahl (via Wikimedia) Apparently, plague-ridden Europeans needed a comical stooge onto whom they could foist their blame and frustration, and the Jewish snowman fit that bill. ![]() As he sits slumped with his back turned to the deadly fire, the adjacent text pronounces the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The despondent snowman seems to be of anti-Semitic nature, shaped with the stacked-ball method, and donning a jaunty Jewish cap. Bob Eckstein, author of The History of the Snowman, found the snowman’s earliest known depiction in an illuminated manuscript of the Book of Hours from 1380 in the Koninkijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, Netherlands (shown above). Snowman with charred backside in a 14th-century Book of Hours (via Koninklijke Bibliotheek)Įarly snowman documentation has been discovered as far back as the Middle Ages, but we must assume that humans, creative beings that they are, have taken advantage of the icy materials that fall from the sky ever since winter and mankind have mutually existed. It requires minimal artistic skill, as the placement of a few simple twigs and rocks can furnish your creation with an eerily expressive personality. Building a snowman utilizes materials that are free of cost, easy to manipulate, and plentiful in certain times and places. Humans are innately drawn to creating effigies of their own likenesses, often forging the figures from a crude stack of frozen balls plopped one atop of another. NFT #eternal #exotic #wierd #aesthetic #1.Dutch queen Wilhemina & princess Juliana as snowpeople in the Netherlands (1913) (via Nationaal Archief)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |