Cavaliere Blu
alias Adrian Peter
Codex Insecta
Grosseto, 2025
Insects, blessings and curses
The first known depictions of insects appeared 30,000 years ago ... painted with charcoal on stone. Insects can be a blessing, as well as a curse for us humans. They can annihilate entire harvests, causing devastating famines, and can spread diseases like the plague. But they can also be food themselves or, like honeybees, produce a food that is highly sought after. And without the far-reaching pollination services of many insects, literally nothing would grow on our trees and in our gardens.
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DIVINE INSECTS AND SUPER BEINGS SINCE THE FLOOD
The Babylonian sky god was called Anu. In ancient America , in the Hopilanguage, “anu” means “ant”. The word “naki” can be translated as“friend”. So, in Hopi, “anunaki” is translated as “friend of the ant”. Thismeans that on two separate continents, there are two almost identicalnames for the transcendental race of “super beings” that played thestarring roles in the flood myth. The only difference is that the Sumerian Anunnaki came from the sky and the ant people from an undergroundcomplex beneath the Grand Canyon. Some extraterrestrial researchersalso believe that the ant people depicted in the Hopi myths wereinfluenced by Egyptian culture. Some ancient Hopi petroglyphs showsimilarities to the African ant species, the Pharaoh ant. According to these theories, they look like a small version of the Pharaoh Akhenatonwho was famous for his unusual, otherworldly appearance.
INSECTS MAY HAVE BEEN CONSIDERED HYBRID CREATURES
The butterfly appears as a symbol of the soul in Western antiquity, as well as in the art of the Far East. The short-lived, fragile butterfly represents the beauty and transience of human existence. The dragonfly is a predatory insect and therefore has different symbolism. In this instance, it is the contrast between the thin, brittle-looking body with shimmering, transparent wings and a grizzly hunting practice where the prey insect is literally torn apart in the air.
In art around 1900, butterflies and dragonflies were both associated with clichéd popular images of the feminine, so the pictorial universe of Art Nouveau is inhabited by many woman-insect hybrids. The two animals embody different, even antagonistic, female archetypes of the fin de siècle:
The delicate butterfly represents the fragility of the “femme fragile”, memorialised in music in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. Like the butterfly, the “femme
fragile” is ethereal and ephemeral, illusive to men and can only be possessed permanently at the cost of her death.
Unlike the “femme fatale”, whose beauty itself brings death. The reputed threat of her promiscuous sexuality is encapsulated in the image of the predatory dragonfly. Lalique’s “femme libellule” combines the fragile beauty of a young woman with a predator’s claws to form a puzzlingly ambivalent fantasy creature.
FROM THE LAST JUDGEMENT TO HOKUSAI AND ALLEN JONES
On the left wing of his triptych The Last Judgement, the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch depicts the fallen angels as insects. The apostate angels plunge from a large cloud into the Garden of Eden. As they fall, they transform more and more clearly into opalescent insects that swirl around the battling archangel Michael. In Franz Kafka’s alarming story The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a dung beetle. In his new form, rejected by everyone, he is mistreated and eventually dies. In his story Flypaper, the hyperrealistic writer Robert Musil immortalised the gruesome death of the insects on the toxic sticky flypaper called “Tangle foot”. But Kafka, Musil, Mickey Mouse, Fritz the Cat, Rammstein, Baudelaire, Henoch, Huellebecq and Murakami are not my only inspirations. I've also been inspired, above all, by the illustrators Janssen, Stanton, Crumb, Willie, Hokusai and Allen Jones.