Fat Art Appreciation

Sumo (2019) with superb photographer Sylvie Blum and her divinely beautiful subject, Angelina Duplisea, with her devastatingly iconic derriere, a total masterpiece of human perfection!

Berlin artist Marie Schwab … I love this pic and its wide variety of bellied guests as well as their friendly canine friends!

Fold by artist Scott Hutchison

Wonderful art by Jette Asmussen!

From the superb Mexican digital artist Nacho Dung … wonderful work indeed!

Figurative art by Maine artist Joan Vienot

Artist William Yu … such a beauty!

Chuppy Lady by artist Raija Merilä

Consumption of Images, Self-Image, and the Self (2017) by Julie Emmer

Earth Mother 2, a stupendous work by Russian artist Andrey Surnov and simply stunning to behold!

Jalen Brunson scores 45 to lead my New York Knicks to their first NBA title in 53 years! And, of course, he snagged the NBA championship MVP too. Great job guys — we’re all so proud!

A spectacular 1930’s photograph of Chicago White Sox owner J. Louis Comiskey (1885-1939), who sadly passed of heart disease as the mere age of 53. His dad owned the Sox before him before he assumed ownership in 1931. He’s my image of a great sports executive, looking totally and completely large and in charge! The Comiskey family owned and managed the Sox until 1961 when Louis’s son lost a turf fight to gain majority ownership that had originally been deeded to his sister but then sold by her outside the family (the son made the mistake of giving her a low bid, thinking incorrectly she wouldn’t sell to an outsider). Bad move!

Resting by Candice Flewharty

Beautiful art by Ludwik Maciąg (1920-2007)

Primarily, a fat belly could be understood as a sign of gluttony and drunkenness. As we saw above, such vices were described as fattening the body, often isolated to the stomach. Gregory the Great had stated in his Pastoral Care that ‘when the belly is distended through gluttony, the virtues of the soul are ruined by impurity’, identifying the fatness of gluttony as the fatness of the belly. Similarly, Matthias Erb’s volume describes how with gluttony and drunkenness, the stomach expands to the point where it ‘wants to rip with the weight of food’ and becomes ‘stretched like a drum’. Such descriptions offer an image of the glutton’s belly as unnaturally large, with such disproportionate bellies clearly seen in several caricatures created by Hans Weiditz around the year 1520. Seven of his woodcuts created in this period contain such figures. Perhaps most notably, in Dance Partners, the man’s belly is drastically out of proportion with his limbs. With his chin lifted as though gasping for air, he appears to struggle to move with the weight of his over-extended stomach, even though he pronounces he can dance and skip ‘in a courtly manner’.