History’s Most Important Snowmen
Building one was probably the third thing humans did upon encountering snow (after making snow angels and peeing in it), but we don’t give a lot of thought to the humble snowman. We run outside to make one during the season’s first snow, remember how hard it is to make a snowman, give up and don’t think about it again for a year. But snowmen have played important roles in history, starting with…
The First Snowman
Again, the first snowman was probably created about an hour after the first snowfall, but the first known depiction of a snowman wasn’t until the 1380 publication of a Dutch book called The Book of Hours. In true “unhinged medieval art” fashion, he has a dump-truck ass, heavy naturals and a worried expression, as he’s had a literal fire lit under his literal ass, which is just rude.
Michelangelo’s Snowman
The Medicis were kind of the Kardashians of Renaissance Italy, and it says a lot about them that, instead of rallying the fam to build their own snowmen and thus some treasured memories during an unusually heavy snowfall in 1494, they hired the best artist they knew to do it. To be fair, they weren’t the only ones — in fact, it was something of a tradition among patrons of the arts to see whose guy could make the best snowman, and Michelangelo was undoubtedly in the running. Sadly, we don’t know much about what it looked like, other than that it was huge, beautiful and his first experimentation with towering human sculpture. Yes, it probably had a massive dong.
La Statue de la Résistance
During the 1870 Siege of Paris chapter of the Franco-Prussian War, French sculptor Alexandre Falguière made his feelings about the whole situation known with a nine-foot snow sculpture he called La Statue de la Résistance. It depicted a nude woman with crossed arms sitting defiantly on a cannon, which actually sends a pretty unclear message about the conflict, assuming Falguière didn’t intend to convey that it’s sick as hell.
The Schenectady Massacre
In 1690, two guards stationed at the gates of the English settlement in Schenectady, New York decided they deserved a night off. They fashioned two snowmen to stand in their place and hopefully ward off the French from a distance, then they peaced out to the pub. It didn’t work: Hundreds of attackers stormed the gates in the night, burning the settlement to the ground and killing dozens of settlers. It’s unclear if that included the guards, but it was probably preferable to facing the survivors.
The Miracle of 1511
The winter of 1511 in Brussels was a particularly long and cold winter at a time when long and cold winters meant a lot of death, but the Brusselian public wasn’t about to succumb to despair. Instead, they channeled their anxiety and frustration into one of the biggest, most elaborate and filthiest snowman displays the world has ever seen. Hundreds of snowmen comprising 50 scenes, more than half of which were “sexual or scatalogical in nature,” dotted the landscape in whimsical defiance of environmental and social catastrophe.
That was the real marvel: Many of the scenes reflected the political grievances of the people of Brussels, pressuring officials into enacting much-needed reform and marking the last time, justly or otherwise, a snow boner was described as a miracle.
