It never really occurred to me until this past week, but I guess it makes sense. We get the English word “Volcano” from the accusative form of Vulcan’s Latin name. With all those stranded European travelers hurling accusations at a certain volcano* of late, it should be an easy bit of etymology to remember.
In honor of said accused volcano, I offer you this image, taken from the Farnese Hours, a late sixteenth-century** book of hours currently held at the Morgan Library (MS M69):
The Index of Christian Art identifies the man with outstretched arm as Vulcan himself, igniting the fire within a smoking volcano (though if you ask me, it might just be a purple cloud near a mountain peak). The nude man surfing down the smoke plume (or nearby mountain), however, has yet to be identified. Here’s a closeup image. Let me know if you have any ideas.
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*Sure, I could ctrl-c + ctrl-v the volcano’s name from a web news source and pretend I know how to spell it, but what would be the point?
**I hope you’ll forgive me for using a late sixteenth-century image for my Monday Marginalia post, but volcanoes don’t feature very heavily in medieval art, due to the decided lack of active volcanoes in continental Europe.