At first sight, or even at second, there may not seem to be a lot of point in writing an article about 1491. The fact is that nothing much happened in that year. Okay, Henry VIII of England (he of the 5 ½ wives) was born, as were Ignatius of Loyola (known to his friends as Lola) and the explorer Jacques Cartier (who later went on to invent the famous watch). But apart from that, 1491 was a bit of a non-event.

Otherwise known as MCDXCI or 2035 (twenty-five to nine) in the Buddhist calendar, 1491 was preceded by 1490, in which a considerable number of things happened, and succeeded by 1492, in which year even more things happened.

Twenty-five to nine in the Buddhist calendar.

1490 was virtually exploding with interesting events. Well, according to Wikipedia it was anyway. Lots of notable people were born and died and Leonardo da Vinci observed capillary action in small-bore tubes, not to mention inventing a new oil lamp. Marketing never being one of Leo’s strong points, these innovations are recorded only in his notebooks. Along with the helicopter, the tank and the electronic calculator. And they call him a genius.

In 1490, Charles John Amadeus of Savoy became the Duke of Savoy at the age of 1. Savoy might not seem much but he was also king of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Armenia, which is a considerable amount of real-estate for a one-year-old. Unfortunately Charlie fell out of his bed at the age of seven and died. History does not tell us the altitude of the bed at the time, but it certainly put paid to holidays in Cyprus.

Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus (died 1556) was born. This is a great relief to us all. Archie survived Charlie by 59 years, three wickets and 63 runs.

In 1491, the Aztecs, not to mention the Incas, were calmly going about their daily business. This consisted mostly of sacrificing each other and building pyramids for no apparent reason. Still, it gave them something to do and, by then, they’d been doing it for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Christopher Columbus, an Italian adventurer with a talent for self-publicity that would have made Silvio Berlusconi wince with shame, was still trying to persuade the Spanish court to fund a voyage westwards to India. Without success. Most people being reasonably convinced that India was in the East, where it had always been.

Still, one can fondly imagine those halcyon days of American independence. I suppose the day would start with a cup of coffee and a ciggie. It might be followed, at lunchtime with a plate of chips or even a dish of chilli con carne (or whatever they called it before the Spanish came along). Naturally barbecuing was de rigeur with guinea pig, roast potatoes and sweet corn high on the menu. And after ritually counting your gold and silver, a nice pre-Columbian evening would be rounded off with a smooth glass of pulque and an After Eight.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, apart from the guinea pig.

The ancient Aztec after-dinner mint. Circa 1491.

And what did Columbus have to offer? Actually, the smart money is on NOT MUCH. It’s claimed that he introduced the horse and the Catholic Church. So the uneatable and the unspeakable at one fell swoop.

Unless, of course, you happen to be French.

It’s true that the horse enabled South Americans to get about a bit more although they were pretty useless in jungles, where the Aztecs tended to live, and in mountains, where the Incas lived. Still, one shouldn’t complain because they were extremely practical on the wide-open pampas, where nobody lived.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church turned out to be far more successful. Not being sensitive to altitude or jungle density, it flourished in this new environment. Admittedly, it flourished at the expense of hundreds of thousands of native Americans and it did seem to be more concerned with counting wealth than saving souls, but by what we can roughly term the modern era, South America was successfully dominated by Catholicism.

But the year is still 1491, and you can still enjoy your cup of dark roasted blend, and a ciggie.

1491 was notable for the birth of Teofilo Folengo. Teofilo, or Teo as we will call him, was an Italian poet who wrote…well…rubbish, to be honest. Teo embarked on his writing career as a Benedictine monk and, if you ask me, he should have stuck to that. However, in his magnum opus ‘Baldo’ he did manage to rope in pirates, shepherds, witches, a giant, a centaur, a magician, demons and a voyage into the underworld. Needless to say, it was a run-away bestseller. J.K. Rowling, eat your heart out.

Having never actually read ‘Baldo’, I can’t honestly testify to its worth. It might be a long-lost literary gem, although I very much doubt it. The main problem for me is that, although pirates, witches, a giant, a centaur, a magician, demons and a voyage into the underworld are fairly acceptable and true to life, shepherds are straining credibility.

As you can see, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel to say anything notable about the year 1491. Okay, 1490 didn’t exactly set the world on fire but compared with the following year it fairly burst with energy. On the other hand, we all know what happened in 1492. They even made a couple of films about it. One of them was simply named ‘1492’. There aren’t many years that you can say that about.

But there is something to be said about 1491. It was the lull before the storm. It was the year before the final cataclysm burst upon America. You might compare it with the never-ending summer of Edwardian England before the First World War. I’m not claiming that 1491 in America was a paradise but 1492 was paradise lost.

Followers of this golb – who, believe it or not, are increasing by the day – may have noticed that when it comes to religion I have been a little less than complimentary. This is mainly owing to the fact that I believe the phenomenon of religion to be a load of utter rubbish. And not just utter rubbish but very dangerous utter rubbish too.

As you will now know, if you have read more articles then this one, The Opposite is pretty non-discriminatory. In line with this policy, I’m going to be just as non-discriminatory about religion too. All religions are rubbish, bar none. So if the Muslim world wishes to kill me for my beliefs – or lack of them – it will just have to form an orderly queue along with everyone else.

A group of clerics forming an orderly queue.

Naturally it’s not enough just to call religion utter rubbish and leave it at that. It should be enough, but unfortunately it isn’t. Adherents to religion, of which there are millions, insist that you back up your ideas with arguments.

Arguments? I’m expected to produce logical arguments to defend myself from the illogical?

Lacking any original arguments myself, please allow me to quote briefly from Robert Tressall’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: ‘Was God unaware of the miseries of his creators? If so, then He was not all-knowing. Was God aware of their sufferings but unable to help them? Then he was not all-powerful. Had He the power but not the will to make His creatures happy? Then He was not good.’

I think this is direct and to-the-point. Naturally adherents of religion will point out that we cannot possibly understand the way God’s mind works and that there is a higher purpose in His manic behaviour. Personally, I can’t understand how Kim Jong-il’s mind works either but I doubt that there’s a higher purpose behind it. If it comes to that, I don’t fully understand how my wife’s mind works and neither do I want to – it would take a lot of the beauty out of our relationship if I did.

How God's mind works (simplified).

Now all of this would be pretty academic if it were not for the fact that a lot of religions are rather intolerant of non-believers. And even if they are not intolerant, they still expect their own people to abide by a code that is often unnatural and rarely in tune with the world around them. A good example of this is the Pope’s claim that condoms encourage the spread of AIDS instead of preventing it, calling them ‘a misguided and immoral weapon’. Even though the statistical evidence points clearly to the contrary. Of course, the Catholic Church is in a bit of a dilemma over this. Having banned the use of condoms for years on the grounds that contraception is a sin, it now has to come to terms that there is a secondary use of condoms that could benefit mankind hugely, of which contraception is, as it were, a by-product. So what do you do? Of course, you claim that they don’t work. And thousands, if not millions, are infected with HIV as a consequence.

The Catholic Church adamantly insists that the way to combat AIDS is abstinence.

Great.

The Catholic Church in a tight spot.

But this is to get bogged down in details. The basic problem with most religions is that they believe in ideals. If only we would behave in this ideal way, most if not all of our problems would be solved. However, although religions have been around in one form or another for millennia, none of these ideals appears to have worked. At least, not to any great extent. Of course, the various religions will claim that they have not worked because we are not sticking to them but might it not be that these ideals are unworkable in the first place?

Take Jainism, for example. One of the basic principles of this ancient religion is the sanctity of ALL forms of life. Taken to extremes, you wear a face mask so that you don’t accidently inhale and swallow some unfortunate insect. However, given the trillions of insects in the world, not to mention even more trillions of microscopic life forms, it’s rather unlikely that even the best-intentioned Jain can go through his or her life without killing a significant amount of fellow organisms. They are also, for some reason, forbidden to eat potatoes. But ginger, apparently, is okay.

The root vegetable of all evil.

Jews are forbidden to eat seafood; Muslims are forbidden to eat any meat that is not from a herbivorous animal; Hindus consider any herbivorous animal fair game as long as it’s not a cow. Strangely, both Jews and Muslims consider the pig an unclean animal and Muslim dietary law insists that all herbivores can be eaten if slaughtered in the name of God by a Muslim, or – at a pinch - a Christian or a Jew.

To use a good Yorkshire expression, this is just daft.

25,000 years ago, people understandably felt a need to give some point to their existence. No doubt they looked up at the stars, the sun and the moon and considered that, in some vague way, they were responsible for the earth and Us. After that, we developed complex mythologies to explain why we behave in the way we do. Belief in the divine was also a handy way of absolving us of any personal responsibility for our actions – everything was dictated by the gods or God and we had very little say in the matter.

Unfortunately, along came science. We found out that the earth was not created in seven days a few thousand years ago but as a natural development about 4.5 billion years ago. Thanks to Charles Darwin and others, we discovered that life on earth has been a process of evolution and that our earliest ancestors were probably small rodent-like creatures that had as much conception of God as a jellyfish has of Michael Jackson. We learned about the Big Bang and the theory of a constantly expanding universe. And we learned that we are an infinitesimally small part of the cosmos.

A baby jellyfish attempting to make sense of Michael Jackson.

Mind you, what happened before the Big Bang is another matter. But, significantly, it’s also a matter that no established religion on this planet has so far seriously addressed. But I can tell you now that whatever it was that caused the Big Bang had absolutely nothing to do with Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Buddha or any other of the icons that millions still cling to. It’s something for which we have no name.

And I hope we never will.

A few weeks ago, The Opposite looked at the subject of humour (humor) in the course of which I happened to mention Art and, I must admit, a bit dismissively. Naturally, this is doing Art a great disservice and so it’s time to redress the balance a little and give Art a thorough going-over.

Great Art, it is said, makes you reflect on life, the human condition, etc. While there’s some evidence to suggest that this is true, there are certainly more effective and direct ways of doing it. For example, Picasso’s famous picture ‘Guernica’ may, in its rather tricksy way (light-bulbs in the sky, etc.) make you reflect on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and man’s inhumanity to man. But its sheer abstraction can just as equally leave you entirely cold. On the other hand, Robert Capa’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War bring home all of its horrors immediately. Without being Art.

In fact, Art is pretty much a nineteenth-century invention. Before that, it was called painting, sculpture, music, poetry, etc. and it all served a very practical purpose, which was to entertain the rich and, in some cases, the poor. For centuries, if not millennia, it also had a religious function. After all, if you were unable to actually read about God, you could at least see him on the wall, the ceiling or standing modestly in an alcove. And also Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, assorted apostles and, further back, Jupiter, Venus and Mars.

God. Self-portrait.

For the rich, Art was mostly decorative. They were – and still are – particularly fond of depictions of themselves, perhaps romantically on horseback or simply standing in front of a rather bland background surrounded by children and greyhounds. For a horse and greyhounds substitute swimming pools and Art-deco mansions and you’ve got David Hockney. But let’s make no mistake about it – although some of these rich people certainly regarded themselves as ‘patrons of the Arts’ they were far more concerned about having something nice to hang on the wall, preferably painted by someone famous and preferably showing themselves. Its future market value was and still is a major consideration.

It may come as something of a shock to some, but even one of the greatest painters of them all – Rembrandt van Rijn – painted exclusively for money. For him, Artistic technique was simply a way of increasing his market value. He had a painting factory with apprentices who copied his style, filled in the bits that he couldn’t be bothered to paint and sometimes painted pictures themselves ‘in the Rembrandt style’ – presumably for customers who paid less. So it’s not surprising that identifying a ‘real’ Rembrandt is fraught with difficulties.

A genuine Rembrandt. His famous Gypsy Girl.

Whether you are talking about painting, sculpture, music or the occasional Shakespeare play, the main question for every ‘Artist’ was how to earn a buck. Given that Art has always been highly competitive, the name of the game is to steal a march on your rivals. These days, I believe it’s called competitive edge. If you could make a painting, sculpture or whatever with ‘wow value’, you could be reasonably sure of a sale. To this we owe perspective, chiaroscuro, and also virtually every school of Art you can name. To put it in a contemporary context, who is going to make the most money at the box-office? Lord of the Rings, replete with CGI effects, or a film version of ‘Measure for Measure’?

But in the nineteenth century something went horribly wrong. Art with the capital A was invented. Artists started to take themselves seriously as Artists. Art for Art’s sake was created. Vincent van Gogh was fully prepared to live out a miserable life in poverty and insanity because he believed in his Art. He was a loony. The very idea of Artists starving in garrets because they refuse to surrender to perfectly normal commercial instincts is ridiculous to say the least.

Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait.

So why did this come about? The simple answer lies in the industrial revolution and the rise of the self-made man. Basically, once you had made a stack of money and bought yourself a huge house in the country, the next thing on the agenda was to cover the walls with Art. The problem with this was that very few of these self-made men knew anything about Art at all – but they knew what they liked.

Not being complete idiots, Artists immediately saw a gap in the market. Not a small gap either but a deep yawning chasm with birds flying around in it. All they had to do was to convince these self-made people that they were genuine Artists. To do that, they had to invent Art. So instead of being mere painters, they were now members of Artistic movements. Movements such as neo-classicism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, neo-impressionism, Art nouveau, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, etc. Because all of these movements were relatively small affairs, it was comparatively easy to rise to the top. Consequently the work of Art enjoying pride of place in the comfortable home of Mr. Frederick Bloggs, the well-known steel magnate, was not just a childish approximation of his face but none other than a seminal work of the neo-Dadaist-cubist Ishmael Lichtenstein, and worth a quid or two.

Mrs. Mavis Bloggs. Ishmael Lichtenstein.

Naturally the Art movements were all dressed out in fancy theories that no-one could understand – least of all the Artists themselves – and this simply added to the mystique. By definition, non-Artists could not understand Artists and therefore could not understand Art. But they still felt that it was, well…significant. It was culture. It was the difference between the great unwashed and the privileged few.

The Dadaists tried vainly to do something to undermine what was by then a confidence trick of global proportions but by that time the whole business had got wildly out of hand. The leading Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp even resorted to exhibiting a urinal which he signed R. Mutt and submitted for exhibition under that name. But the prank backfired. Duchamp ended up authorising 10 reproductions (of what was a mass-produced urinal anyway) and in 2004, it was voted the most influential Artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British Art-world professionals.

Marcel Duchamp attempting to tell us something about Art.

And since then things have simply gone from bed to worse.

So if Art confuses you, don’t worry. You’re actually perfectly normal. So are the Artists. But sadly, many of them are considerably richer than you.