4 ms·

Im a bit surprised this is a speculative matter. If 2 in 7 samples had it, it surely would've been in some of the many pieces of art we have from the period and

Im a bit surprised this is a speculative matter. If 2 in 7 samples had it, it surely would've been in some of the many pieces of art we have from the period and if it was in the art it wouldn’t be so speculative. Are there paintings of people smoking pot in 17th century Italy? If not why not.

ulizzle 3y ago
That's a good point, and I think it is because it wasn't as powerful as other drugs. Cannabis today is far stronger than even 20 years ago if you go by old hippie lore. We do know people ate magic mushrooms and used psychedelics all the time, and that alcohol and tobacco were used widely as soon as discovered. Maybe that's a truly modern thing. The 420 art.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  In SE Asia in the 70's and early 80's, I remember folks using weed as part of a larger medicinal-plant system, more than a thing by itself. My Mom used to get an oily balm to rub on her joints for arthritis pain that had it as one of many ingredients. I don't remember a lot of smoking or using it specifically to get high, though. FWIW.
swatcoder 3y ago
Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow slices of life. Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and political fashions decade after decade. It’s a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it’s the exception by a mile. You can’t expect to get the complete picture of a past culture just through it’s surviving art.
coffeecantcode 3y ago
Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and before rarely took the form of cultivating and smoking the flower of the cannabis plant like we have seen in the last century and was more so focused around creating the tar-like hashish which was sometimes smoked but often times cooked into food and consumed in that way. It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use surviving to this day. Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I don't know how it was in general, but for example in The Count of Monte Cristo I think the Count and his guests primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking. It's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical. So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is preserved from the 17th century.
- benbreen 3y ago
  Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history). The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addiction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier: >In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa. I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.

ulizzle 3y ago

That's a good point, and I think it is because it wasn't as powerful as other drugs. Cannabis today is far stronger than even 20 years ago if you go by old hippie lore. We do know people ate magic mushrooms and used psychedelics all the time, and that alcohol and tobacco were used widely as soon as discovered. Maybe that's a truly modern thing. The 420 art.

Baeocystin 3y ago
In SE Asia in the 70's and early 80's, I remember folks using weed as part of a larger medicinal-plant system, more than a thing by itself. My Mom used to get an oily balm to rub on her joints for arthritis pain that had it as one of many ingredients. I don't remember a lot of smoking or using it specifically to get high, though. FWIW.

swatcoder 3y ago

Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow slices of life. Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and political fashions decade after decade. It’s a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it’s the exception by a mile. You can’t expect to get the complete picture of a past culture just through it’s surviving art.

coffeecantcode 3y ago

Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and before rarely took the form of cultivating and smoking the flower of the cannabis plant like we have seen in the last century and was more so focused around creating the tar-like hashish which was sometimes smoked but often times cooked into food and consumed in that way. It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use surviving to this day. Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.

nerdponx 3y ago
I don't know how it was in general, but for example in The Count of Monte Cristo I think the Count and his guests primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking. It's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical. So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is preserved from the 17th century.
benbreen 3y ago
Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history). The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addiction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier: >In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa. I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.