16 Oct 2014

'In Praise of Folly' Desiderius Erasmus

This Summer I worked on the design and illustration for a hardback Folio edition of 'In Praise of Folly' written in 1512 by Desiderius Erasmus, a humanist thinker and social commentator. It has just been published, and today I received the finished item! Below are four of the nine inside illustrations: 'Folly of Superstition', 'Folly of Fools', 'Portrait of Folly' and 'Folly's Family Tree'. More information about the book and the project are on the Folio website.

The greatest of humanist scholars, Desiderius Erasmus was one of the men who ushered in the Renaissance. The leading intellectual of his era, today his most popular work is In Praise of Folly, a satire that even at its most biting is animated by a warm and lively wit. ‘In Praise of Folly is both the most notorious and in some ways the most characteristic work of the greatest European intellectual of the sixteenth century’  Eamon Duffy