Bob Eckstein, The History of the Snowman

Bob Eckstein, The History of the Snowman, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, New York, 2007

The Modern Snowman came into his own approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, around the invention of the postcard, when the image of the snowman became a cog of commerce, exploited to sell any number of products. It is therefore not surprising that over time he has become an increasingly generic icon. 10

Not every large snowman dies a quiet, slow death. Each year in Zurich, the Swiss celebrate Sechselauten by using large amounts of explosives to blow up an innocent snowman. Always on the third Monday in April, bakers, butchers, blacksmiths, and other tradesmen parade on horses and throw bread and sausages to the crowds. In return for free meat, girls decorate the riders with garlands made of spring flowers. Sechselauten (which means “six bells ringings”) comes from the tradition that, at six o’clock, the guild members put down their tools and call it a day. Meanwhile, the Boogg is schlepped through town. The Boogg is a large, cotton-wool snowman with a corncob pipe, button nose, and two eyes made out of coal—he looks the same every year because the same guy has been making the Boogg for over thirty-five years. Unfortunately for Mr. Boogg, he’s filled with firecrackers and plopped onto a forty-foot pile of very flammable scrap of wood. For him, things will only get worse. After the bells of the Church of St. Peter have chimed six time, representing the passing of winter, the townspeople light the pile and watch and carnage. It is believed the shorter the combustions, the hotter and longer the summer will be. When the head of the snowman explodes to smithereens, winter is considered officially over. 18

Renaissance Snowmen go back to a time when snowmen, more often than not, were created by artists striving toward making works of art; as a result, snowman makers put considerable time and effort into the craftsmanship of snowmanship. 89

We know sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made snowmen right onboard their ships. One story, dating back to 1851, tells of the crew of the Pioneer who entertained themselves while trapped in ice floes near Greenland by building snow sculptures—including a notable statue of Britannia, the national symbol of Britain (the seated young woman holding a spear and shield seen on their money). 114

Not only did the snowman exist in the Middle Ages, he flourished. At a time when stilts and puppet shows passed for entertainment, the public was starved for the next “big thing.” With plenty of famine, plague, and sickness abounding, winter festivals and other government-endorsed morale boosters provided relief to the starving masses who were either feeding on grass or dropping dead. The thinking was to have the public blow off steam for a week or two and allow erotic dancing, excessive drinking, and political jokes, all under government supervision. During one brutal winter, the city of Brussels covered the entire city with snowmen, a spectacle they called the Miracle of 1511. / For six straight weeks, beginning January 1, the temperatures stayed below freezing and these snow sculptures represented the public’s fear and frustrations during what was called “the Winter of Death.” It was a much needed distraction from the problems of class strife, low self-esteem, and, of course, the Guelders. (The Guelders were from Gelderland, once a part of the Low Countries in the Netherlands, and a group that enjoyed attacking Brussels.) / From the colorful surviving accounts, we know that these were not your run-of-the-mill snowmen. Every corner of Brussels was occupied with snowmen and snow women pantomiming the local news or classical folklore: snow biblical figures, snow sea knights, snow unicorns, snow wildmen, snow mermaids, and snow village idiots. 119-121

Everyone, even great noblemen, went outside to make quality snowmen, not just trained artists…There were fifty elaborately executed scenes with total population of 110 snowmen. The 1511 winter festival displayed politically charged and sexually obscene snow scenes in the streets for all to see—an early form of visual satire and commentary (121)…More than half the scenes were sexual or scatological in nature. Numerous snowmen were sculpted in erotic embrace. (122)

Politically, the role of the snowman was never more integral to Brussels’s community. The display of frozen politicians was the town’s de facto op-ed page. Townspeople depicted the most feared characters, like the devil or enemy ruler, defecating. In one snow scene, a drunkard drowned in his own excrement. One group of snowmen, looking very much like those from a rival castle of Poederijen, show their leader wincing as his aide goes to the bathroom. Making the devil as a snowman helped the public laugh off this anxiety. A sculpture of the king of Friesland (Freeze Land) represented Satan, who was responsible for winter and blamed for deep frosts and the serious annual threat it brought to everyone’s health and earnings. 122

Jan Smeken also tells us that a virgin of snow with a unicorn in her lap graced the front of the ducal palace at Coudenberg in north Brussels. Although the unicorn is the traditional element of religious high art symbolizing Christ, the snow sculpture’s location in the front yard of the home of the absentee duke Charles V suggested otherwise—this was a political cartoon about Charles refusing to live in his palace and his insistence upon living instead with his aunt Margaret of Austria in Molines. Just as the Virgin protected the unicorn against enemies, Brussels hoped Charles would have done likewise. Brussels would eventually welcome him back with a festival in 1520, and all was forgiven. / The Miracle of 1511 was neither the first snow festival nor the first with snowmen. There was one of a smaller scale in 1481, and other nearby cities hosted similar events: Mechelen (1571), Rijssel (1600 and 1603), and Antwerp (throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). But the Miracle of 1511 was the festival to top all festivals. It literally changed the society of Brussels, by giving the public a voice, shifting the balance of power back to the public, and changing the class system within Brussels forever. 124

Meanwhile, the following year, Michelangelo pulled off a little thing called the Sistine Chapel. Blasphemous! How dare we lump Michelangelo in with the pedestrian activity of snowman making? Ahhh, but Michelangelo had already made a snowman earlier in his life. It didn’t snow often in Florence, but there was a tradition among artists to populate the city with snowmen when it did. In 1494, after a heavy snowfall on January 20, Piero de’Medici, who had inherited control of Florence, commissioned the young sculptor to model a colossal snowman in the courtyard of his palace for part of the evening’s winter festival. / Critics thought this was a real insult to the great artist (a prank by Piero, knowing the work would only melt away), but Michelangelo felt indebted to Piero’s father, who was an old friend and loyal patron of his work. 124-125

One of the hot button issues surrounding the Miracle of 1511 was classism and the exorcising of class prejudices through snowmen. Each social class (the elite, the middle class, the lower class) created its own brand of snowmen caricaturing their opponents and reflecting their ambitions and obsessions. The opinions among these social classes caused heated animosity when expressed through the snowmen. Offended partied acted out by beating up the snowmen hurtful to them. 127

The Brussels authorities decided to take action, and posted flyers with measures threatening severe punishments for any person caught damaging a snowman: “The noble men from the city of Brussels proclaim that nobody, during day or night, could break any personage into pieces.” Yet, while city magistrates were involved in the policing of the snowman jackers, snowman makers could still choose subjects of their own free will and exercise free speech. 128

Snowmen were a huge phenomenon in the Middle Ages. As soon as kneadable snow arrived, towns filled with snowmen and snow sculptures comparable in quality and concept to stone and bronze sculpture counterparts. A pharmacist of a Florentine apothecary (a medieval drugstore), Lucas Landucci, wrote in his diary in 1510, “A number of the most beautiful snow-lions were made in Florence…and many nude figures were made also by good masters.” A famous ballad written in 1461 by the great French poet Francois Villon asks, “But where are the snow (figures) of yester-year?” This was not referring to the prison Villon was writing from but to the snowmen of past winters, specifically, the gloriously creative explosions of Brussels (1457) and Arras, France (1434)—with their beautiful biblical representations, mythological stories, and medieval heroes. 128

At some point, he had a nasty run-in with the devil. The story does that, while Francis was praying, Satan asked for him by name three times. Feeling possessed by the shout-out, he decided the only sensible thing to do to rid himself of the devil would be to strip and begin whipping himself on the backside with a stick. “Crying while he didn’t it, ‘thus brother ass thou must be beaten,’ after which he ran into the snow and made seven snowballs, intending to swallow them if the devil had not taken his leave.” (The Every-Day Book) / Eating snowballs to ward off Satan would explain some of the peculiar snow activity pervasive in some later paintings. In Pieter Brueghel II’s painting Le Denombrement De Betheemi (1610), snowballs are seen being carted away and an angry mob force-feeds snowballs to a woman who could pass for a witch… 133-134

Why the public would embrace this notion is made more clear in Pieter Huy’s Le Jugement Dernier (1554), a massive, ambitious pil painting on display in the Royal Museum of Belgium, in Brussels. The artwork depicts judgment day: a fiery hell vividly illustrated in the foreground, with scorched scenes of grotesque images and bodily functions. Heaven is in the background and is represented as a kind of cool, enormous igloo. Fire, bad; snow, good. 135

The earliest visual evidence of a snowball can be found in an old fresco in Trento in an ancient Italian castle called Castillo del Buonconsiglio. The large, peeling fresco is January of the common “cycle of the months” motif and was made in 1403. It illustrates a snowball fight in the foreground between two aristocratic groups… 136

Over the years, Columbus became obsessed with finding an earthly nirvana, constantly spotting paradise on the horizon. (On his third voyage he found the Orinoco River, which he called one of the rivers of paradise. In a letter from 1498, he concluded that the world was indeed not round by pear shaped, like a woman’s breast, with the nipple as the newly discovered paradise.) 139

…first snowman ever in art of any form. Painted in the margins of a beautiful illuminated manuscript (currently in the Royal Library, in The Hague), which dates around 1380, is a snowman—wearing only a strange hat and a look of concern while his butt burns from a log fire under his stool. The melting snowman is created in the familiar method we’re accustomed to seeing today: a modern snowman with one snowball stacked on top of another. Medieval snowmen had always been sculpted pieces of art, and without the snowmen marginalia, it was uncertain whether the snowball method was even known at the time. Centuries would pass before anything similar would be seen again in any surviving books or art. / The text on the page is a sober, mournful psalm detailing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: “Lord, you gave up the ghost shortly after uttering the words, ‘It is finished.’” Next to this line is the snowman with his back to us. The snowman is not so much an analogy for death as it an extreme example of using humor to deal with pain. The hat tells us this is a Jewish snowman. Artists painted unusual hats on Jews to brand them as outcasts. Fools and court jesters wore hats while Christians removed their hats in front of the altar. While Cain is depicted in dozens of paintings in a variety of hat designs, the intention behind the use of a Painting of the Crucifixion scenes often show those turning away from Christ and persecutors wearing bizarre hats. It is truly unfortunate that the oldest visual evidence of a snowman is anti-Semitic. The Cockaigne rationale for the melting Jewish snowman is twofold: (1) the ironic polarity of the light-hearted activity of snowmen making with the fact it illustrates a passage about Jesus dying on the cross; and (2) it’s the opposite of Christianity in the eyes of that unknown artist with the love of Christ playing off the “hatred” of Jews. Dying Europeans in the fourteenth century, needing to know why they were afflicted by the plague, sought out a scapegoat. Common people started a rumor that Jews of northern Spain and southern France were poisoning the Christian wells and spreading the plague. Pope Clement VI and recognized leaders tried to discredit the charge, calling the accusation “unthinkable,” but by 1348, Jews were blamed for the disease’s spread. 141-143