God was learning to draw

“God was learning to draw” is the punch line and mock proof in Michele Scalza’s wager about the Cadgers. By turning their caricatured faces into evidence of ancient origins, Scalza reverses the usual association between physical proportion and nobility: the figures who appear least conventionally composed become, by his logic, the oldest and most aristocratic of mankind.

The expression in context

The phrase comes from Scalza’s defense of the Cadgers, a name for professional beggars. His companions expect him to lose a wager that they will provide a supper for the winner and six companions. They have chosen Piero di Fiorentino to judge, and Neri Mannini has agreed to challenge Scalza’s claim that the Cadgers are nobler than anyone else.

Scalza builds his argument from a premise the company has just accepted: the more ancient people are, the nobler they are. He then asserts that the Cadgers are more ancient than everyone else because they were made by God when He first began to learn to draw. The comic expression supplies a mock origin story, presenting human creation as an artist’s early, imperfect practice.

The faces as comic evidence

Scalza does not leave the claim at the level of an extravagant assertion. He invites the company to compare the Cadgers with other people. While the rest of humanity has faces that are well composed and proportioned, the Cadgers, he says, have long, narrow faces, excessively broad ones, noses too long or too short, jutting chins, enormous jaws like an ass’s, and eyes set at unequal heights. These features, he argues, resemble the faces children make when they first begin to draw.

The joke depends on converting supposed bodily irregularity into proof of historical priority. The features that mark the Cadgers as visibly different become, within Scalza’s invented reasoning, signs that they belong to an earlier stage of divine craftsmanship. His conclusion that they are therefore nobler than the rest of mankind is deliberately out of proportion to his evidence; that gap is the engine of the argument’s comedy.

The wager and its payoff

The listeners initially dismiss Scalza, saying that he is trying to gull them. He responds by offering a wager and submitting to a judge of their choice. Once he has presented his reasoning, Piero, Neri, and the other young men laugh and accept that he has won. They extend the joke by affirming that the Cadgers are the noblest and most ancient gentlemen not merely in Florence but in the world or the Maremma.

The tale also connects Scalza’s joke to an earlier description by Pamfilo: in discussing Forese da Rabatta’s appearance, Pamfilo had said that it would have looked notably ugly even among the Cadgers. That comparison treats the Cadgers as a comic standard of ugliness; Scalza’s wager turns the same standard upside down, making them the supreme aristocrats. The expression thus anchors a miniature contest in verbal ingenuity: a caricature becomes an argument, and an argument becomes a supper won through laughter.