Ne supra crepidam

The phrase is recorded in Book 35 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History as ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret[1] ("Let the cobbler not judge beyond the crepida") and ascribed to the Greek painter Apelles of Kos.

Supposedly, Apelles would put new paintings on public display and hide behind them to hear and act on their reception.

[2] On one occasion, a shoemaker (Latin sutor) noted that one of the crepides[a] in a painting had the wrong number of straps and was so delighted when he found the error corrected the next day that he started in on criticizing the legs.

[4] The same idea is also proverbial in Danish (Skomager, bliv ved din læst), Dutch (Schoenmaker, blijf bij je leest), German (Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten), and Polish (Pilnuj, szewcze, kopyta) and—slightly modified— in Russian (Суди, дружок, не свыше сапога, "Judge not, pal, above the boot"), after Alexander Pushkin's poetic retelling of the legend,[5] and in Spanish (Zapatero, a tus zapatos, "Shoemaker, to your shoes") and in Slovene (Le čevlje sodi naj kopitar, "let the cobbler judge the shoes only"), from France Prešeren's poem depicting the story.

"[7] An ultracrepidarian—from ultra- ("beyond") and crepidarian ("things related to shoes")—is a person considered to have ignored this advice and to be offering opinions they know nothing about.