The Flatulist (or ‘Kiss my Ass’)

Entry

The subject of this convincing, briskly modelled farcical depiction of a barefooted itinerant dressed in rags is an obscenity conveyed in the form of a commoner’s gesture. The man makes a mocking grimace by pressing the thumb of his left hand against his nose, while raising the skirt of his coat, almost imperceptibly, with his other hand. The pushed-up tip of the nose gives his face a snout-like, beastly expression, somewhat resembling that of a pig. Yet the same gesture is also associated with a gesture of provocation referred to as ‘thumbing one’s nose’ or ‘cocking a snook’, used when making fun of (‘taking a grinder’) or deriding others. While best known when conveyed with the fingers splayed, a closed hand variant also exists, here corresponding with the vagrant’s facial expression.

In combination with the raising of the skirt of the coat, this motif has an even more specific connotation conveying the man’s unsavoury intentions: it refers to the expression ‘Kiss my ass’, the origins of which date from the sixteenth century. As recounted in Paradin’s De antiquo Burgundiae statu (Lyon, 1542), and shortly later by François Rabelais, the vanquisher Emperor Frederick Barbarossa subjected the defeated populace of Milan to public humiliation. To escape the death sentence, all citizens were forced to remove a fig with their mouths from the hind end of a female donkey.¹ The form of punishment decreed was in fact retribution for the Milanese people for having previously driven the empress out of the city riding a donkey seated back to front. Their penance ultimately gave rise to the expression ‘kiss my ass’ and its Italian equivalent vaffanculo, a bastardisation of Vai a fare in culo (‘do it in the ass’). The motion of the terracotta itinerant’s right hand can therefore be interpreted as an invitation to kiss his behind, thus identifying, as it were, with the donkey with the fig. Undoubtedly, the donkey’s fig also relates to the much older obscene manu fica gesture, commonly known as the fig sign. In the Low Countries, Rabelais’s version of the story reached a wide audience via Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa’s translation (written under the pseudonym ‘Claudio Gallitalo’).²

Another possible interpretation of the Flatulist’s pose, however, focuses on the act of lifting up the coatskirt, with the left thumb’s placement on the nose alluding to the odorous scent produced by the man releasing a bout of intestinal gas. In this case, the terracotta belongs to literary and pictorial traditions emerging as early as the late Middle Ages, by which the public exposure of the lower regions of the body so as to emit a fart – along with urinating and defecation – became an acknowledged visual idiom in the farcical (in Dutch: boertige) genre. In both satire and humoristic imagery, scatological themes and flatulence play a major role in defining the self-esteem, morals and social mores of the burgher and upper classes by means of an exemplum contrarium, in this case the uninhibited, unscrupulous behaviour of vagrants, beggars and peasants.³ Besides the odour associated with such emissions, the audible aspects of passing wind were likewise regarded as a source of entertainment. Over the centuries, flatulence therefore gave rise to a steady stream of publications, poems, and anecdotal material, but also written works of pseudoscientific research such as the Physiologia crepitus ventris et risus [...] (Frankfurt 1607) or the French L’art de péter. Essai théori-physique et méthodique from 1776.⁴ If indeed belonging to this tradition, the terracotta Flatulist could then be seen as a farcical personification of Smell from a series of comical depictions representing the Five Senses.

The Flatulist has in the past been attributed to the Antwerp sculptor Pieter Xaveri (1647-1673) based on the modelling style, farcical theme and the figure’s facial expression. On closer consideration, however, this attribution proves unconvincing.⁵ The naturalistic but nervous modelling deviates from Xaveri’s concise style. Moreover, given that all the sculptor’s known surviving terracottas bear his signature and date, their absence here is circumspect. Acknowledging an origin in Xaveri’s native city of Antwerp, a somewhat later dating must be deemed more probable, placing the terracotta at the end of the seventeenth or the first half of the eighteenth century. This better reflects the sculpture’s sketch-like modelling, but also the striking agreement between the flatulist’s grimace and the grotesque facial expression of the left-hand figure in the terracotta group of Two Drunkards by the Antwerp sculptor Jan Pieter van Baurscheit I (BK-2006-19).⁶ Both also share the obtrusive, pushed-up nose and the frontally exposed nasal cavities. Comparable, though substantially less expressive statuettes of beggars were also produced by the little-known Antwerp sculptors Joseph Gillis (1724-1773)⁷ and his contemporary Joseph Willems (1716-1766). Born in Brussels, Willems worked as a modeller of porcelain statuettes for a period of time in Tournai (end of 1739-1748) and Chelsea (1748 to c. 1765).⁸ Various porcelain versions of his creations survive today, among them a beggar from circa 1755 wearing a headdress similar to that worn by the Flatulist. ⁹ Somewhat reminiscent, though more subdued, is a terracotta statue of a standing black man dressed in rags and holding a bowl in his hand, measuring 74 centimetres high. Signed by Willems and inscribed with the date 1736, this work is possibly a portrait produced ‘from life’ in the studio.¹⁰ My thanks to Bieke van der Mark, 27 March 2023.] Overall, Willems’s statues look rather static and posed, and invariably stand on rectangular bases, with or without cut-off corners. The Flatulist’s dynamic, expressive figure and naturalistically rendered base rule out an attribution to this sculptor. Nevertheless, an origin in the milieu of eighteenth-century Antwerp, in which Willems and Gillis were both active, remains tenable.¹¹

The Flatulist was donated to the Rijksmuseum in 2000 by Michael E. Hall Jr in the honour of William R. Valentiner (1880-1958), former director of the Detroit Institute of Arts.¹² In the same year, Hall also donated three other works to two American museums, likewise in Valentiner’s honour.¹³

Frits Scholten, 2025

Frits Scholten, 2025