This Painting Captured The Bare Human Condition In Only 8 Words
In 1656, Salvator Rosa created the darkest and most accurate meme of all time
The word “meme” is universal in our language. It feels like the term has always been with us. But it has a technical birth date. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, deriving it from the Greek mimema (imitated.)
Dawkins compares memes to genes, since both replicate, carry information, spread, and mutate. It’s a clever concept but not exactly novel. While the traditional meme is a picture with occasional words sprinkled in, the idea that pictures can spread meaning is ancient.
Our ancestors began this practice of painting on the walls of caves, and it evolved with us as our color palette and skills improved.
The wizards of the Renaissance took it to another level. However, we generally call their masterpieces “art,” not memes, even though their works convey great meaning and spread.
The mixture of words and pictures enables deep concepts to be passed on economically, like the fragility of life with the inevitability of pain and death. Salvator Rosa’s 1656 painting L’Umana Fragilità (Human Frailty) did just this.
In fact, within his ghastly painting above, he summed up the bare human condition in only eight words: “Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori — ‘Conception is a sin, Birth is pain, Life is toil, Death a necessity.’”
It’s completely dark and not something I’d ever want to throw my arms around, but recent life events have caused it to speak to me.
Like all good memes or art, there’s much nuance buried within the words and pictures. An excellent place to start is the way pain can affect your mind.
The Suffering That Clears Our Vision
Dr. Craig Wright says many brilliant minds suffered the early tragic loss of a parent in his book The Hidden Habits of Genius.
Notable names like Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Bach, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, Mary Shelley, Marie Curie, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath fit this category. Not to mention Friedrich Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius.
Wright believes the ability to see the world differently maybe “forged in the crucible” of suffering. But what happens when this suffering is magnified beyond the loss of a parent?
Viktor Frankl used the pain of living through the Holocaust and losing his entire family to pen one of the greatest books ever written, Man’s Search For Meaning. He also created a therapy called Logotherapy to help those who are lost find that meaning.
Before Salvator Rosa went through his crucible, he was known for painting lavish landscapes with a romantic quality. He was also an accomplished actor, witty poet, and musician who embraced the joys of life, although this changed in 1655.
TheFitzwilliam Museumin Cambridge says Salvator Rosa lived through a plague that devastated Naples that year. He lost his young child, his brother, his sister, her husband, and their five children. But this was only part of the pain.
The National Library of Medicine claims anywhere from forty-three percent to half the population of the Kingdom of Naples died in the plague. It’s staggering to consider. Imagine half the people you know suddenly were gone. In a way, it was a Holocaust.
The Fitzwilliam Museum quotes Rosa as saying, “This time heaven has struck me in such a way that shows me that all human remedies are useless and the least pain I feel is when I tell you that I weep as I write.”
It also pushed Rosa, a well-known comic actor, a man of good humor, and a practical jokester, to pick up a paintbrush and create something different.
The Meaning Within The Picture
The child is Rosalvo, Rosa’s child, sitting on the lap of his tired mother, Lucrezia. Death is central in the frame, disturbingly clutching the child’s wrist, which is holding a stylus. It’s hard to make out, but the child is writing the previously mentioned “Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori.”
In itself, it’s symbolism that the child was taken before he could write, as the darkness of death envelops the entire scene. Over the left wing of death, the faces of an old man and child symbolize youth and age, while that same wing covers up a falcon — a symbol of life.
The boy in the left corner is blowing a bubble, showing the shortness of life as it blooms, then pops into oblivion. In fact, the entire painting is a series of memento mori or symbols of mortality.
The mixture of youth, fatigue on the face of the mother, and prominence of death illustrates the idea that “Conception is a sin, Birth is pain, Life is toil, Death a necessity.’”
And while the Fitzwilliam Museum — which houses the painting — may call it art, I’ll refer to it as a meme. This is due to one final symbol within the painting the museum curator missed.
The Barely Visible Text
I’m sure you’ve looked over the painting for the explosive eight words hinted at in the title.
Can you see them?
The final meaning hidden within this meme is that you can’t.
You’d need to be right on top of the physical painting to make out the words, and that’s impossible here. In a meme sense, what does this remind you of? It took me time to concentrate and focus on Rosa’s work, but it finally struck me.
As Dr. Wright indicated, being forged in suffering can change how you see the world. It changed his list of geniuses. Likewise, the sea of pain Frankl was tossed about opened his mind to the idea that meaning could be found in suffering.
You can also see it with Rosa in his style transformation within the painting. The lively comedian with a bright color palette goes dark. Moreover, within this shadow, he hides a truth about human life only a wounded eye can see.
This is the secret of Rosa’s painting or meme. You can’t visualize the world as he sees it until your face is buried in it. He neatly put this human condition into eight words, but it can’t be understood entirely until it’s lived.
All this meaning is wrapped up in that painting, and it’s transferrable as far as the viewer can understand it through lived experience.
In the past five years, I’ve lived through the death of my mother and a brother, in addition to watching pillars in my life — which I always thought would be there — fade away. So, I could pick out Rosa’s theme, and understand some of his pain of loss during the plague.
I think it’s a theme I’ll never forget. So, despite how art critics label Rosa’s painting, I’ll call it a meme. In fact, it’s the darkest and truest meme of all time since we’re all destined to experience loss or suffer in some way, so the meaning can only spread.
I first learned about Rosa’s painting from Niall Ferguson’s book Doom, his description of the words written by the child really captured my attention.
-Originally posted on Medium 1/3/24