'Whipping Toy'

paper pulp, acrylic on canvas 22 x 18 x 2’’

During the reign of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies of the 15th and 16th centuries, in the royal court there was a position, to which a young boy, usually of high status, was appointed to take the punishment on behalf of the prince. He was called a ‘Whipping boy‘. The ‘divine right of kings’ (a political and religious doctrine, asserting that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, but to God himself) was not allowing for the young prince to be physically punished or even touched, except by his father, the King. Unfortunately, the King was almost all the time unavailable, so the court tutors were having trouble educating the prince.

Because the prince and his whipping boy grew up together, they usually formed a strong emotional bond, which was ensuring the efficiency of the punishment even more. In a biblical sense, the idea of a whipping toy is equivalent to the one of the scapegoat. The word ‘scapegoat‘ is recorded by 1530 in Tyndale’s Bible. In the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement, one of two

goats was sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been symbolically laid upon it, while the other was sacrificed. In Christianity, especially in Protestantism, this process prefigures the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Jesus Christ is seen to have fulfilled all of the Biblical ‘types’ - the High Priest who officiates at the ceremony, the Lord’s goat that deals with the pollution of sin and the scapegoat that removes the burden of sin.

The painting depicts a configuration of toys, reminiscent of the crucifixion of Christ. It’s a representation of children’s psyche dealing with guilt and blame. The guilt is imposed on a child by an external source, which it transforms into blame towards objects at its disposal (toys). It’s a mechanism, nonconductive to comprehension of guilt, only to its automatic transferring ahead. Just like all human sin is transferred literally, without being comprehended, to the scapegoat - Jesus on the cross. The violation here is that of The natural law, that binds misdeed to penalty.