The Fox and the Mask is one of

Aesop's Fables Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to ...

, of which there are both Greek and Latin variants. It is numbered 27 in the

Perry Index The Perry Index is a widely used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. The index was created by Ben Edwin Perry, a professor of classics at the Un ...

A fable for the empty-headed

The fable is always briefly stated and seems chiefly the vehicle for a criticism of the good-looking but stupid upper class. A fox comes across a mask anciently used by actors; after an examination, it remarks, 'So full of beauty, so empty of brains!' The Latin version of this, generally shortened to ''caput vacuum cerebro'', then became proverbial. It is recorded by

Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' wa ...

in his ''

Adagia ''Adagia'' (singular ''adagium'') is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumen ...

'', along with its Greek equivalent (Ὦ οἷα κεφαλὴ, καὶ ἐγκέφαλον ούκ ἔχει), with the explanation that it originates from Aesop's fable. There are different versions of the story, sometimes involving a wolf contemplating the broken head of a statue. Its earliest English appearance is in

William Caxton William Caxton ( – ) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, and as a printer (publisher), printer to be the first English retailer of printed boo ...

's collection of the fables (1484), under the title of "The wulf and the dede man’s hede”, as an example of the proposition that ‘Many one ben whiche haue grete worship and glorye but noo prudence’ . But

Andrea Alciato Andrea Alciato (8 May 149212 January 1550), commonly known as Alciati (Andreas Alciatus), was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists. Biography Alciati was born in Alzate Brianza, nea ...

, the influential Italian originator of the

emblem book An emblem book is a book collecting emblems (allegorical illustrations) with accompanying explanatory text, typically morals or poems. This category of books was popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Emblem books are collections ...

, generally pictures a fox contemplating a mask. The six-line Latin poem accompanying it declares that it is mind, not outward form, that is most important (''Mentem, non formam, plus pollere''). This version also appeared in a

Neo-Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

poem by

Gabriele Faerno The humanist scholar Gabriele Faerno, also known by his Latin name of Faernus Cremonensis, was born in Cremona about 1510 and died in Rome on 17 November, 1561. He was a scrupulous textual editor and an elegant Latin poet who is best known now for ...

. The version in

La Fontaine's Fables Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered cla ...

is told of a fox and a bust (IV.14). However, the fable is merely alluded to in his poem, which is more a meditation on appearance and comments at the end that the fox's remark "to many a lord applies". When the caricaturist J. J. Grandville illustrated the ''Fables'' in 1838 he updated the social comment, using animals instead of humans. At an Academy exhibition, a fox glances sideways at a pompous portrait bust that is being examined closely by an ass, with the figures of a uniformed duck and an owlish dandy in the background. The German philosopher

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (, ; 22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781) was a philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the developmen ...

also reinterpreted the fable in 1759, identifying chatterers as its target. In England it was young children who ignore their studies to whom the versified fable of "The Fox and the Mask" was applied by Richard Scrafton Sharpe in his ''Old friends in a new dress: familiar fables in verse'' (London, 1807). Later in the century,

W. S. Gilbert Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most f ...

revisited the dichotomy between reality and representation in his comic poem "The Pantomime 'Super' to His Mask". There the actor condemns the mask as being brainless and reliant on him for the histrionic success of the inane emotions it expresses. The mask replies that if the actor looked within he would find a correspondence between what he enacts and his true personality.Richard Moore
''Genres and Provenance in the Comedy of W.S. Gilbert''
Routledge, 2019

References

External links

*Book illustrations of "The wolf and the head
from the 15th century
*Book illustrations of "The fox and the mask
from the 15th - 19th century
{{Aesop Fox and the Mask Fox and the Mask Fox and the Mask