Rabisch!

“I am the Abbot of Cockaigne” – Ego sum abbas cucaniensis – go the lyrics of Carmina Burana. The title of abbot was widespread among companies of goliards – the wandering students and clerics who wrote irreverent, satirical Latin poetry – in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; in the same spirit, the Feast of Fools crowned its own Pope. In sixteenth-century Italy, the self-styled Academy of the Val di Blenio, a boisterous group of artists and intellectuals who posed as mere laborers, named Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo their abbot and went well beyond mere revelry. Behind their jests lay deeply considered artistic and philosophical ideas, and their model of a “world turned upside down” was far more radical and deliberate than any mere Carnival. Within the spiritual and intellectual freedom of a learned Neopaganism, they brought forth hybrid, monstrous creatures in which – alchemistically – the mineral and vegetable kingdoms overflow into the animal and the human. Antonio Pepe leads us into one of the most mysterious wrinkles in the history of art.