Leonardo Da Vinci
First published in The Guardian, 9 February, 2016
First published in The Guardian, 12 December 2012
First published in The Guardian, 16th Nov 2011
First published in guardian.co.uk on 8 August 2012
First published in The Guardian on 4 December 2013
I was sitting at an extendable table and, half-bored, wrote the words “extendable table” in my notebook. I then asked myself which artwork has a long table in it. Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” quickly came to mind. Sometimes you just stumble upon a premise that opens up such a rich vein of silly ideas you begin to wonder why cartooning ever seemed hard. The dialogue followed fairly naturally from the premise and led to several of those idiotic leaps of logic that really tickle me. Leonardo painting Christ and the apostles from life despite the nearly 1,500 year time difference is the main one.
Leonardo put mind numbing levels of thought into all his paintings. The amount of work that went into each apostle’s expression, gesture and position in “The Last Supper is fairly common knowledge but something I didn’t know until recently was that the tapestries in the background (long since painted over) were arranged by Leonardo according to Pythagoras’ musical harmonic mean of 6, 4, 3, so that their widths are respectively a half, a third and a quarter of the size of the first as they recede into the background. I’m starting to think the guy was some kind of a genius. Knowing the level of detail he went to makes the cartoon Leonardo’s lacksadaisical ad-lib approach even funnier.
First published in The Guardian, 19 March, 2014
I found this page of old police mugshots in my sock drawer. No idea how it got there but it meant I didn’t have to think up a new cartoon, which was a relief. This may be cheating but morality isn’t my strong suit.
Occasionally, due to the extreme ineptness of the wannabe criminal, a case goes viral on the internet. This happened with Venus de Milo. It didn’t hurt that she was topless.
Judith slipped into Holofernes tent with the promise of sex and under this false pretense took something extremely valuable from him. Holofernes was so shocked that he lost his mind. Also his beard, hair and face. His whole head basically.
As is the case with the vast majority of aircraft arrests, Leda was probably drunk. Have you ever noticed that kids born to parents of different races (miscegenation) are usually very good looking? Apparently it is even more pronounced when the parents are of different species (mistake). One of Leda’s children from this disgusting encounter was Helen of Troy. True story, though a myth.
Picasso started out as such a fine, skilful artist that it is almost unbelievable he became so crap at drawing later on. It’s so hard to believe that I suspect he might have been doing it on purpose. The authorities certainly thought so and he was duly arrested. Wrongly in my view. He obviously had mental problems.
The gendarme who arrested Manet’s barmaid was heard to say of her that the lights were on but nobody was home. Fair enough. Any bar staff worth their salt could tell that this Toulouse-Lautrec person was underage. He was also highly aggressive and appeared to have a chip on his shoulder about something. I was pleased to discover that this truculent individual was successfully prosecuted and placed in a young offenders institution for 32 years.
