and three of his oldest friends swear an oath of austerity. As part of the oath, they promise to remain celibate, fast one day each week, and eat only one meal per day the remaining days of the week. The pact was to last for three years.71 The character Longaville explains,
I am resolved: ’tis but a three years’ fast.
The mind shall banquet though the body pine.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.72
Longaville here describes a mind and body in conflict. When a man plies his body with food and drink, developing “fat paunches” and “rich ribs,” he is also bankrupting his wits. But when a man fasts, starves his body, makes it “pine,” now he is offering his mind a “banquet,” one that makes possible higher intellectual pursuits.
This quote, particularly the couplet that begins, “Fat paunches have lean pates,” was widely circulated in seventeenth-century England. Many believe it was originally penned by Shakespeare, but there is also evidence that he cribbed the idea from Saint Jerome, the fourth-century Roman priest. Jerome himself was thought to have translated the Greek expression “A fat belly does not produce fine senses.”73
Even if Shakespeare is not the ultimate source of the expression, it is consequential that several of his works propagated the view that slim men had sharp wits, whereas fat men were insipid. This was to be found, for example, in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, when Caesar states,
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.74
The view of fat men as too self-indulgent to be particularly intelligent was embodied in the character of Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays, was creative and resourceful in some respects, but too much of a gluttonous, drunken, braggart and a thief to be taken as a thoughtful nobleman. He cops to this in Henry IV when he cries, “If I do grow great, I’ll grow less; for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”75
Coming from one of the most important artist-intellectuals of the English Golden Age, these and other works by Shakespeare make a broad cultural statement. They suggest that greater than concerns about the potential relationship between fat and health during this era was the dread of fatness as indicative of weak character and dullness of mind. Indeed, it was not only artists and poets who made such connections. Many important scientists and natural philosophers shared the perception that full stomachs were correlated to empty heads.
Figure 2.5. Eduard von Grützner, Falstaff, 1910.
The writings of René Descartes are a case in point. Though he was not an Englishman, Descartes’s ideas were incredibly influential among English intellectuals. He too claimed that base sensual desires, especially for food and drink, could stand in the way of higher pursuits. Condemning the animal appetites, Descartes offered counsel to those who might otherwise be prone to overindulgence in food and drink. In a series of letters on the topic to his friend Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, the granddaughter of King James I, he advised Elisabeth to regulate her food intake so as to ensure the best exercise of her mental faculties, urging “a good diet, taking only food and drink that refreshes the blood and purges without any effort.”76 Elisabeth countered: “As for the remedies against excessive passions: I agree that they are hard to practise, and indeed that they aren’t sufficient to prevent bodily disorders; but they may suffice to prevent the soul from being troubled and losing its capacity for free judgment.”77 These correspondences underscore the belief that eating too much stymied rational thought. Freeing oneself from the whims of sensual desire created space for intelligent thought and action.
Elisabeth was not the only English person privy to Descartes’s discourses on the appetites.78 His ideas about the relationship between appetites and intellect spread like wildfire in England. Those who did not identify as Cartesians respected his import, even reproducing similar notions, particularly when it came to questions of overfeeding.79 Walter Charleton, a natural philosopher and court physician to Elisabeth’s uncle, Charles I, was one such intellectual. Charleton published his own treatise on the perils of overindulgence. The “finest wits,” Charleton wrote, were not “the custody of gross and robust bodies; but for the most part [are lodged] in delicate and tender constitutions.”80 As a physician, Charleton was likely aware of the growing medical concern regarding portliness among English men. But, in keeping with many intellectuals at the time, Charleton’s own concern seems to have been less about the effects of excess fat on the body than about what corpulence indicated about the mind. When he wrote about the ill effects of fatness, he was concerned with what obesity revealed about the character and mental capacity of the man who might so openly flaunt his rotund body.
Other English intellectuals were more directly influenced by Descartes. And in terms of the presumed relationship between fat and intellect, they resolved to practice what they preached. Robert Boyle, for example, a contemporary of Charleton and a follower of Descartes’s life and work, was nearly as well known for his abstemious diet and delicate physique as for his theories. His body was believed to be a demonstration of his mental fortitude, as he was praised for his “depth of knowledge” and his refusal to allow the vagaries of appetite to derail him: “he neither ate, nor drank to gratify the varieties of appetite, but merely to support nature”; for these reasons, he was deemed “thin and fine”—with the latter term here serving as a synonym of refined—like a typical “hard student.”81
English philosophers, several of whom were influenced by Descartes, treated fatness as evidence of vapidity. Such was the case with the philosopher Henry More. More’s lean physique lent credibility to his intellectual pursuits. Early in his career, More maintained an avid love affair with Cartesianism, which came to an abrupt halt as he matured. But he never escaped the swirling cultural influence articulated perhaps most notably by Descartes on the relationship between sensuality and intellect. More was known to have “reduc’d himself … to almost Skin and Bones.”82 He was praised by his own biographer for his temperance and his “ethereal sort of body,” which served as evidence of his mastery over the animal nature within.83
Figure 2.6. Peter Lely, Portrait of the Honorable Robert Boyle, 1689. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
This is where, unexpectedly, the artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens comes back into frame. Rubens never knew Charleton, who took the post as court physician one year after the artist’s death, but he had frequent dealings with the English. In the early 1620s, Rubens could count King Charles I among his high-class art patrons and protégés. An amateur painter and art collector, Charles I had pestered Rubens for a self-portrait, which the artist reluctantly provided.84
Rubens died before Cartesianism took off. But it is worth noting that Descartes was only an important proponent, and not the progenitor, of the relationship between abstemiousness and intellect. Renaissance artists and intellectuals in England and the Low Countries often harbored a romance for Neoplatonic austerity. Rubens was, surprisingly perhaps, counted in this number. For though he is remembered for painting round and fleshy women with skin “white as snow,” he himself observed a strict diet. Writing to his nephew, Rubens lamented the fatness of so-called modern men:
The chief cause of the difference between the ancients and men of our age is our laziness.… [We are] always
