text:
Imaging Inscape: The Human Soul (1913)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 17, 2021

In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod.
And yet, he argues, it is possible to image the fluidic invisible with instruments more precise than the human eye — capturing the radiation of thoughts, feelings, and other emissions of soulscape. As Anthony Enns discusses in an essay on visualizing thoughts, Baraduc experimented with magnetometers and electrographs before deciding that photography was the best technology for “recording invisible forces emanating from the nervous system”. Unlike most photographers, the paranormal researcher did not always use a lens, preferring, instead, to have his subjects directly transmit their soul’s vibrations onto a chemical plate, which was sometimes placed against a person’s forehead to reduce latency. So as to distinguish this technology from photography, which uses solar light, Baraduc called his process iconography:
In iconography, the plate receives, very slowly, no longer by the solar ray, but by an electro-vital current (wind, breeze) or simply by a direct emission, no longer, the exterior light of the object, but what is called its internal light, its intimate soul, which it records.
To harness this aqueous force requires replacing “the exterior luminous ray of the here-below” with “the electric breeze, projecting the emanated vibration of our soul”. Only then will the fluidic invisible allow itself to be magnetised — “one must, in a word, know how to induct the psycho-odo-fluidic current”.
And indeed, Baraduc knew how to induct something: interspersed in the original French text of 1896, and collected at the end of the English translation above, we find reproductions of these iconographic plates. Something strange happens as Baraduc’s book progresses (as if all this was not yet strange enough). The prose he uses to describe his iconographs glows with an energy stylistically akin to the very vitality that he claimed to capture: “Red obscurity. State of soul magnetising; desire-demand, prayer to the psychic universal spirit of the world. The prayer has elliptically inflected a very beautiful net of fine psychic lamellas; subtle cosmic pneuma, universal web of light, of remarkable purity.”
Unfortunately — and rather beautifully — Baraduc’s printed plates are less remarkably pure, but almost remarkable for their impurity. The lead image shows an underexposed figure surrounded by a web-like aura, which has sprouted something resembling a wing. It is captioned: “the Od attracted by the state of soul of a child lamenting over a recently killed pheasant”. Other plates look like shimmering refractions of light on mica or quartz, which are explained as the Od “individualising itself to repair the deficient sensitive soul” and “Life-animules”. In one image, Baraduc used a  Nadar photograph, which he subsequently overlaid with “psychicon” — Baraduc’s thoughts made visible. Some plates evoke a night sky, showered with comets (“Large sized pearls of voluntary psychob”) and another contains a handprint in the negative, with caterpillar-like bristles frizzing outward from all fingers (what he elsewhere calls “soul germ”). For the scholar Jed Rasula, Baraduc’s occultism was merely an intensification of that encrypted presence of other life that we feel when viewing any media form. “Every transaction with a text, a musical score, a painting, or a sculpture, is a personal seance.” Baraduc was attempting to perform this “seance” in real time, accessing those aspects of other people — their internal spiritual lives — that we can only normally experience through translation.
If, in his attempt to access the “inner” world, Baraduc sounds rather “out there”, you would not be the first to try and discredit his claims. As Peter Geimer chronicles, the polymath Adrien Guébhard led a “ten-year crusade against Baraduc’s ‘false flames’”. Yet Baraduc was a respected physician, working on the edges of nineteenth-century medical and psychological research. Georges Didi-Huberman recounts, in Invention of Hysteria, that, despite his “delirium”, Baraduc “was, nonetheless, a very serious ‘specialist’”, researching in league with Jean-Martin Charcot and other neurologists associated with the Salpêtrière hospital and its violent legacy. No matter how disproven, Baraduc’s work, writes Didi-Huberman, “was far from marginal to the knowledge or practice of photography, or to the neuropathology of the time. Scientific teratology is effective in science’s own domain.”
While The Human Soul begins in the register of a scientist researching fringe and esoteric phenomena, it ends as a religious treatise. Nested in double negatives, we find a material vision of the Godhead. “Atheists, blasphemers, sceptics, madmen, believers and saints, we are not able not to be God, who only is.” Immersed in a fluidic invisible, of which we are both the container and contained, we float in the amniotic liquid of divinity.


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Gustave Zander and the 19th-Century Gym
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 4, 2022

As some of us squat, shove, and crunch our way toward new resolutions — while others arrive at the relieving conclusion that their Christmas kettlebell purchase makes for the perfect doorstop — we might wonder, with gratitude or suspicion, why and when gym going became such a widespread phenomenon. Long before Muscle Beach, tubs of whey protein powder, or the distinct grade of shame that emanates from an unused fitness club card, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their pecs in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute.
Of course, ritualized group fitness is nothing new: Ancient Greece had gymnasia; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) trained through the game now called lacrosse (one of many intersections between fitness and colonialism); and physical regimens have been encouraged or required by nearly every empire and religion in recorded history. Zander’s contribution and revolution came in the form of resistance training and muscle-group-isolating exercises using specialized machinery, precursors to those contemporary contraptions built from welded metal frames, rubber resistance bands, and stacking steel plates.
In his 1894 treatise on “medico-mechanical gymnastics”, Zander discusses his system as if administering a regimen of medication. “The prescription [of exercise] is methodically composed according to the needs and condition of the patient.” And the regimen worked. As Sven Lindqvist records, Zander’s success swelled at an anabolic rate. Having opened his first institute in 1865 with twenty-seven machines, by 1877 “there were fifty-three different Zander machines in five Swedish towns”. And not long after, Zander reinvented himself professionally. Once a lecturer in gymnastics at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, he soon became an international fitness entrepreneur, exporting equipment to Russia, England, Germany, and Argentina.
The history of the modern work out is inseparable from the history of work. In the late-nineteenth century, concerns related to occupational health and on-the-job injuries came to the fore during discussions among ergonomically-oriented physicians. Zander marketed his machines as safeguards against “a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office”, promising “increased well-being and capacity for work”. In a sense, his machines offset injuries caused by other machines: advances in mechanization created new forms of labor divorced from physical exertion. One had to work out to remain physically capable of performing further work in the office.
As Carolyn Thomas (formerly de la Peña) traces, in her history of “Cybex Space”, adapted from a larger project on machines and bodies, Zander’s project began under the auspices of Sweden’s welfare state. His research was government funded and the gyms accessible to all. After winning a design award at the 1876 Centennial and International Exposition in Philadelphia, he pivoted from a focus on general public “health” to furnishing “elite health spas” and private institutes with his “fitness” machines. “In mechanized workouts”, writes Thomas, “white-collar Americans pumped up their own superiority. By declaring that ‘fitness’ equaled a perfectly balanced physique, rather than the ability to perform actual physical tasks, body power was shifted from laborers to loungers.”
The images collected below come from a catalogue distributed by “Görransson’s mekaniska verkstad”, a gymnastics equipment company, and are reproduced in a book published by Dr. Alfred Levertin on Dr. G. Zander’s Medico-Mechanische Gymastik (1892). Aside from the shock of seeing the gymgoers’ choice of athletic wear (thick three-piece suits with pocket watches affixed on chains), there is something uncanny about the marked lack of exertion displayed on Zander’s patients’ faces. As Thomas explains, unlike contemporary Peloton and Crossfit leaderboards, which prioritize competition and reward individual effort, Zander’s technology was marketed as a passive activity — with some devices even driven by steam, gasoline, or electricity. All one had to do was connect their body to the machine and it would do the work for them. . . or so they were told.  ※※Indexed under…ExerciseSteam-powered

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Odd Showers (1870)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 2, 2021

George Duncan Gibb (1821–1876) begins his Odd Showers on horseback, outside the city of Montreal, loping along a road littered with frogs. Given the newly damp ground and absence of local waterways, he comes to the only logical conclusion: these amphibians fell from the sky. After pocketing a few specimens in his handkerchief, the author rides back to the city, and forgets about his slimy stowaways. The scene turns predictably comical. While Gibb takes tea with fine company in his relative’s drawing room, “which included several ladies”, his specimens free themselves and make for the crumpets.
“Intended chiefly for young persons”, this short, odd book confronts a question that has vexed naturalists for thousands of years: how do we account for the precipitation of animals? In his Natural History, Pliny thought it unlikely that toads and raindrops shared common origins. As Izaak Walton remarks in The Compleat Angler (1653), it would make more sense if frogs turned to slime in the winter and then, during summer rains, regained their animal form, like magic sponge capsules tossed in the bath. While the source of “raining cats and dogs” is contentious — some say it stems from pets slipping off of thatched roofs in the 1600s — Gibb thinks he has discovered the solution regarding fishes and lizards: they are “sucked up by waterspout or otherwise raised by a hurricane and transported to a distance more or less remote”. Invoking a suspiciously named authority on such matters, Dr. Arthur Fisher, the author moves on to odder phenomena still: red snow, as recorded by Armenians in 1056; red rain, which stained the streets of Orsio, Sweden, ca. 1711; and hailstones made of millet seed, which sowed their way across Silesia centuries ago.
For a book about showers, the tone is rather dry and disenchanting throughout, and it remains unclear why Gibb aimed his book at children. As if realizing that he needed to lighten the tone, he concludes with an original poem, a deluge of fourteen quatrains, which certainly achieve merriment, but mainly at the poet’s expense:
To such concerning frogs we don’t give ear,      Though well described by Pliny;Their reality though never proved, some aver,      Whom the learned look upon as silly.But when we talk of showers of fishes      Perceptibly doth our visage lengthen;With good testimony it soon diminishes,      From undoubted examples we make mention.Ha! Not so with newts and lizards,      For we but a single instance give,Yet if honest story be considered      This odd shower we cannot disprove.
Gibb’s biography contains its own odd shower of anecdotes. He completed his medical degree at McGill with a thesis titled “Morbid states of the urine”, perhaps evidencing a lifelong fascination with abnormal torrents. He later moved to London and achieved notable prestige in medicine as a laryngologist, and dedicated his treatise on the whooping cough to Lord Elgin. With a side interest in geology and archaeology, he was famed for his industry: working as a reporter for the Lancet for a decade, Gibb wrote an estimated 3120 columns. Sadly, as David A. Crawford notes, Gibb died in disrepute, having obsessively pursued his claim as the rightful inheritor of “a defunct baronetcy of Falkland and Carribber” (hence his occasional use of the wishful pseudonym “Carribber”). Yet regarding “odd showers”, it seems Gibb got it right: the lluvia de peces occurs annually in Yoro, Honduras and, in Norfolk, our new millennium was ushered in by a school of airborne sprats, flying high on Gibb’s mechanism.


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Resurrection on Repeat: Rules and Orders of the Humane Society (1787)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 19, 2022

To bring the deceased back to life, especially those taken before their time, has long been a dream of legends and myth. In the case of the “apparently drowned”, however, it is possible to perform the seemingly miraculous and restore a limp body to full animation before lethal asphyxiation occurs. Yet despite the relatively simple techniques needed to perform this operation, they have taken millenia to develop. Early representations of resuscitation are shallow in information. Some scholars point to the Battle of Kadesh, as depicted at the Egyptian Ramesseum, where the drowned Hittite Emperor is held upside down by his men; others to the Hebrew Book of Kings, where Elisha revives a dead child with his “mouth upon his mouth” as an example of artificial ventilation. The idiom “over a barrel” may point to a practice, possibly medieval in origins, for rolling an unconscious body on a cask until they cough up water (or it might equally suggest flogging). The history of modern resuscitation in Europe conjures, though did not coin, another idiom: “to blow smoke up your”. . . well, we all know where that leads. Driven by an Enlightenment humanitarianism, social reformers and physicians began addressing a leading cause of preventable expiration that had rarely been treated on a national scale — death by water.
In the 1730s, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur popularized a recent discovery: the seemingly lifeless could be revived with a wealth of strategies. This “Pliny of the Eighteenth Century” (Réaumur invented a precursor to the Celsius scale, influenced methods of silk production in China, and pioneered the process of metallic tinning still used today) wrote a pamphlet titled Avis pour donner du secours à ceux que l’on croit noyez (Advice to aid those believed drowned). After debating the pros and cons of tickling the nose with feathers and filling a drowning man’s mouth with warm urine, Réaumur reveals what he believes to be the best technique: using a pipe stem to blow stimulating tobacco smoke into the intestines through the rectum. Louis XV found the pamphlet dazzling and encouraged its wide distribution. Startlingly, as Anton Serdeczny discusses in his recent book on reanimation, soon riverbanks across Europe were lined with “resuscitation kits”, as close-by as a contemporary defibrillator, which contained all the necessary supplies for giving a nicotine enema (and later, thankfully, included bellows as a substitute for breath).  ※※Indexed under…Urinein mouth to revive the drowned
The pamphlet above documents thirteen years of success since the 1774 establishment of Britain’s Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead by Drowning (still in existence, with an expanded mission, today). Why was a society necessary for what many might do on impulse? Despite a wealth of new resuscitation methods, it was difficult to encourage public uptake (even the anatomist William Hunter, for instance, considered mouth-to-mouth breathing “vulgar”). Due to the taboo of touching corpses and a scientific/folk belief that once respiration ceased, so too fled the soul, the semi-drowned often suffocated while surrounded by their rescuers, who presumed them already gone. Also, many would-be lifeguards did not know how to swim. The Humane Society in London was created after Dutch physicians, inspired by Réaumur, established a society in Amsterdam, where canal drownings were plentiful, offering educational information and paying “premiums to those who saved the life of a citizen in danger of perishing by water”. The success of this society, evidenced by its proceedings, encouraged similar social programs across Europe. In Britain, an English translation was commissioned by William Hawes and Thomas Cogan, who founded the Humane Society soon after, announcing “The Plan” in a 1774 pamphlet.
By 1787, the Society was able to show results — 897 lives saved — and, in the rhetoric of welfare statehood, deemed itself a “great public utility”. The pamphlet contains the latest “plain Methods of Treatment” to recover the drowned. First remove the clothes and replace them with the great-coats of bystanders. Then move the body to the nearest pub, preferably with a good fire in winter months. One person should blow bellows into a nostril, closing the other, so that “the noxious and stagnant vapours will be expelled, and natural breathing imitated”, while a second person rhythmically compresses the chest. What, for a moment, resembles contemporary CPR, then takes a culinary turn. Next, rub the body with salt and spritz it with rum: hot brandy should be applied to the stomach and loins when needed and “the nostrils now and then tickled with a feather”. Here comes the tobacco: “fumes should be thrown up the fundament”, continuously, while making sure to shake the body every so often. Should all else fail, the society recommends electrocuting the corpse — a technique only to be tried by “the judicious and skilful”. Never bleed the body.
The rest of the pamphlet is packed with eye-witness testimonies of resuscitation. While the techniques are not quite those we use today, they seemed to get results, and were frequently reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine and other periodicals. Yet the Humane Society’s greatest tool may have been financial incentive: two guineas for attempted rescues in the Westminster area; four guineas per successful resuscitation; and a guinea to the pub for providing premises. Not only were the seemingly-drowned experiencing novel treatments, more bodies were being pulled out of the waters than ever before.
While it is easy to laugh at the idea of a tobacco smoke enema, resuscitation practices continue to be refined — what saves lives today, may soon be antiquated. In 1906, Sydney Holland, President of the Life-Saving Society, fatally ruptured the spleen of a young woman by using the “Silvester Method”, which required four people to lift the arms and apply chest pressure, prompting him to encourage the “Schäfer Method”, where the body is placed face-down and the thorax compressed, which he subsequently propagated throughout the British Empire. The same networks that allowed Holland to disseminate reforms had been used to extract knowledge and medicines for centuries. During the colonial period when non-Western healthcare was systematically dismissed and suppressed as irrational and superstitious, indigenous techniques were refashioned as European. In 1891, physicians were inspired after a man in Australia was restored by a smoky fire, “a native method”. And the tobacco enema, requiring a New World crop, tracks back to the practices of indigenous peoples across North and South America, described by John Tennant, who controversially adapted these herbal remedies in The Poor Planter’s Physician (ca. 1727), more than a decade before Réaumur published his treatise.


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Hieroglyphics of a Rope-Dancer: The Book of Fate (1822)
Text by Kevin Dann
Jan 25, 2022

On July 4, 1822, in the midst of London’s most pronounced season of both Egypto- and Napoleonomania, there appeared in bookshops on the Strand, Piccadilly, and Fleet Street a most curious artifact: The Book of Fate: Formerly in the Possession of Napoleon, Late Emperor of France, and Now First Rendered into English from a German Translation of An Ancient Egyptian Manuscript, Found in the Year 1801, by M. Sonnini, in One of the Royal Tombs, Near Mount Libycus, in Upper Egypt. Authored by Herman Kirchenhoffer — Fellow of the University of Pavia, Knight Grand Cross of the Annunciade of Sardinia, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour — the book featured a large foldout table of “Hieroglyphical Indications of the Planets”, a grid of symbols that were the intermediate key to deciphering answers to thirty-two rather homely “oracular” questions, such as: Shall I live to an Old Age? Shall I ever be able to retire from business with a Fortune? Will my Beloved prove true in my absence? Are Absent Friends in good health & what is their present employment?
A minor sensation deemed a work of “great ingenuity” in the Gazette of Fashion, by November it had spawned a much less ingenious knock-off, London astrologer Robert Cross Smith’s The Philosophical Merlin, whose subtitle echoed and extended the Book of Fate’s extravagant claim of imperial provenance: The Translation of a Valuable Manuscript, Formerly in the Possession of Napoleon Buonaparte, Found Amongst Other Valuable Papers, in His Cabinet, At the Battle of Leipsic; Known to Have Been Highly Prized by Him, and Consulted for the Choice of His Generals.
The Book of Fate sold briskly, seeing a dozen editions before 1840, and another dozen abridged editions — including translations into Spanish and Italian — under various titles before 1923, when pornographic book purveyor H. S. Nichols brought out a facsimile edition of the 1822 work. As sailor Jack Blunt’s much-consulted Bonaparte Dream Book, it had a cameo role in Herman Melville’s Redburn (1849). Although one reviewer had called it an “innocent hoax” as early as 1823, it remains in print, now masquerading under such monikers as Napoleon's Book of Fate: Ancient Egyptian Fortune-telling for Today (1988); Napoleon's Lucky Dream Book: A Book of Fate (2005); and Napoleon's Book of Fate and Oraculum (2010).
While the image of an astrologer Bonaparte, plotting his battles by means of “hieroglyphic indications”, is intriguing, the book was indeed an “innocent hoax”. There never was a “Herman Kirchenhoffer”, nor were any of his august affiliations genuine. The book’s account of discoveries in the tomb at Thebes was cribbed from Louis-Madeleine Ripault’s Report of the Commission of Arts (1800), its historical dissertation on Greek oracles plagiarized from Abraham Rees’ 1810 Cyclopedia and a pair of contemporary sources. The divinatory chart’s “hieroglyphical indications” were all crude freehand renderings of well-known Freemasonic symbols, its oracular interrogatories paraphrasings of the questions posed by a century-long tradition of French jeux divinatoires — cartomantic devices played mostly by young women. “The Writing of Balapsis, by Command of Hermes Trismegistus, Unto the Priests of the Great Temple”, which seguéd seamlessly into elaborate instructions on “How the Enquirer Shall Obtain a True Answer to the Question Which He Putteth to the Oracle”, was pure invention, laced with hijinks such as advising the reader that he might substitute “a pen dipped in common ink” for the reed dipped in blood by the ancient Egyptian priests, and forego confining consultation of the Oracle to eclipses of the Sun and Moon. The book’s explanation for its language — that the idiom of its 1024 “moral axioms” sounded more English than Egyptian because of some universal philosophical convergence — was purely tongue-in-cheek, as were not a few of those oracular answers:
Avoid entering into the land of strangers.Preserve the greatest equanimity at the gaming table.Avoid edge–tools!Yes!
From its cleverly constructed provenance, which passed the papyrus through no fewer than nine separate hands, to its heartfelt dedication to the Empress Marie-Louise (one of the invented owners), nearly every single page of The Book of Fate bore the sly signature of a master prevaricator. Its hallmark was prodigality: the author clearly unable to help himself from fabricating fancies as glibly as its thousand-plus proverbs.
Of the three other books published by this author in 1822, The Napoleon Anecdotes: Illustrating the Mental Energies of the Late Emperor of France, and the Character and Actions of His Contemporary Statesmen and Warriors ran to five volumes, The Maid of Orleans Or la Pucelle of Voltaire Translated Into English Verse with Notes with Notes, Explanatory, Critical, Historical and Biographical occupied two, while the third, France for the Last Seven Years, or, the Bourbons was a mere 424 pages long. Though each bore the author’s name, William Henry Ireland, he had in previous years penned books as “Charles Clifford”, “I-Spy-I”, “Flagellum”, “Aere Perennius”, “H.C.”, “Cervantes”, “Satiricus Sculptor, Esq.”, “Anser Pen-Dragon, Esq.”, “Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland”, “Thomas Fielding”, “Henry Boyle”, and — for Something Concerning Nobody (1814) — “Somebody”. In 1828, as “Baron Karlo Excellmanns”, he wrote yet another paean to his beloved “First Consul”, The Eventful Life of Napoleon Bonaparte: Late Emperor of the French. Despite having written, under his own name, four successful Gothic novels and a four-volume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1828) illustrated by George Cruikshank, when he died in 1835, the author was still widely and derisively known as “Shakespeare Ireland” — a nickname he had earned after confessing to forging a cornucopia of spurious Shakespeare creations, including Vortigern and Rowena, which was produced at Drury Lane Theatre in 1796.
Present-day scholars routinely dub Ireland a “forger” who in the wake of his youthful Shakespeare prank, committed at the age of nineteen, was condemned to a life as a “Grub Street hack”. I prefer to think of him as the real life literary version of Bartolomeo Oranzi, a character from his own 1808 novel Rizzio: Or, Scenes in Europe During the Sixteenth Century, whose funambuliste caperings — leaping thirty feet above the street to pass through a hoop and seize a stout brass ring — Ireland pronounced “the most extraordinary feat I have ever seen performed”. “Thou art cut out for a rope-dancer”, reads one of the thirty-two hieroglyphical indications under the sign of the pyramid. Surely William Henry Ireland, aka Herman Kirchenhoffer, was in that one oracular pronouncement signing his own name.
Below, you can examine a 1797 satirical etching, of the Ireland family as forgers, courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library (the nineteen-year-old William Henry sits before the fire reading a children’s chapbook).

author: Kevin Dann


text:
An Iconic Line: Claude Mellan’s The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 2, 2021

Christ gazes out of the page dolefully, head canted and haloed. He seems to float, disembodied, between our world and the next. And, at first, we could step back in sympathy, shocked by the blood that drips like teardrops from those baleful thorns. But something else soon catches light. It might be the ringed texture of his eyeshine or that fingerprint whorl on the nose's tip. Then we notice the print's corners, where curves recede as waves do from a skipping stone. It can't be, we think — but it is. This image was made with a single line.
Born into a family of coppersmiths in northern France, Claude Mellan (1598--1688) trained in Rome with the painter Simon Vouet, before creating his pièce de résistance in 1649. To make this immaculate engraving, Mellan used a technique known as the "swelling line", which takes advantage of the burin's asymmetrical profile. Just as letters formed by a fountain pen will swell or shrink as the angle shifts between nib and page, by rotating his tool — or widening a preexisting groove — Mellan created visual depth and texture in an unbroken line, incised directly onto a metal plate. While engraving emerged in Germany ca. 1430 as an offshoot of goldsmithing and metalwork, spurred by a newfound access to paper in Europe, swelling lines were not common before the 1560s. As curators at RISD write, the technique was particularly suited for "reproducing the dramatic light and tonal effects of paintings as well as the exaggerated, heroic forms of late Renaissance and Mannerist art". In Mellan's case, he used the technique to reproduce a different kind of dramatic light: the holy afterglow of relics.
The title of this engraving references the sudarium (a handkerchief, or, literally, sweat cloth) of Saint Veronica, exemplary of the relic class known by the Greek term acheiropoieta — made without hand. Think, for instance, of the Turin shroud or the Manoppello image. Veronica's veil was supposedly emblazoned with Christ's image via impression, after she blotted the inky blood from his face on Calvary, a process that itself resembles a kind of printmaking. There is indeed an indexical quality to Mellan's engraving, making it feel intimately connected to Christ, an effect that only intensifies when viewed closely. Even for secular viewers, this image might prompt reflections on the magical quality of mimesis. Writing on the astonishment he felt while looking at photographs, Roland Barthes reached for Veronica's veil: "Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica's napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?" While this engraving was made by a human hand, long before photography, the astonishing complexity and otherworldly beauty of Mellan's image make it feel like a miracle. Built on the "mystic spiral", this image becomes an arcane invitation for contemplation, whether aesthetic or spiritual. As the art historian Irving Lavin writes in an extensive study of his own obsession:
. . . anyone who begins to trace the convolutions of the single, continuous, undulating spiral line that evolves (or devolves, depending on the direction one follows) ultimately to fill the universal void of the paper sheet, cannot escape becoming, as I have been, entranced, enchanted, bedazzled, to the point of obsession with this profoundly moving image.
Mellan's inscription seems to knowingly trade on his engraving's ambiguous status, how it flickers between artwork and icon: FORMATVR VNICVS VNA / NON ALTER (the unique one made by one / [like] no other). Here "one" fractures into a trinity of interpretations, signifying, at once, the singularity of Christ, the veil's irreproducible aura, and the unbroken aspect of a divine, spiraling line.


text:
The Ascent of Mont-Blanc (ca. 1855)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 7, 2021

Mont Blanc in the Alps, near the border of France, Italy, and Switzerland, had an unparalleled impact on the Romantic imagination. Percy Shelley refashioned Burke’s notion of the sublime within this mountain’s vale; Mary Shelley used its “awful majesty” to stage the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster; Wordsworth registered disappointment during The Prelude, finding that the peak left “a soulless image on the eye”; and — in typical form, chronicled by Fiona MacCarthy — Byron “jeered at an Englishwoman, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, whom he overheard asking the members of her party whether they had ever seen anything so rural, as if it were Highgate, Hampstead, Brompton or Hayes”. During the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, the mountain’s “blanc” became polysemous: white but also blank, a page on which to record “peak experiences”.
It was not only poets who sought these treacherous climes. In the tradition of Lord Shaftesbury, who took an Alpine journey in the 1690s, the mountain became a touchstone for politics. As Peter H. Hansen discusses, the mountaineer Jacques Balmat made a contested first ascent in the 1780s, “suggesting resistance to the revolutionary mountain and ambivalence toward the French Empire”. In 1811, a “trigonometrical signal”, which looked alot like a cross, was constructed on the summit, engraved with the names of Napoleon, Balmat, and others, introducing religious iconography in the wake of the revolution’s iconoclasm. For curious Brits unable to traverse its precipices after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Mont Blanc was exported home in the form of entertainment (“The New Game of the Ascent of Mont Blanc”) and human curiosities. Albert Smith, whose ascent was exhibited in London’s Egyptian Hall, brought back a Bernese woman — in line with Thomas Gray’s 1739 proposition that mountain dwellers were spectacular, “Alpine monsters” — whom he introduced to Queen Victoria at Winsor, according to Alan McNee.
Part of this mania for Mont Blanc was fueled by prints, like those made by George Baxter — the father of color printing — based on the sketches of John MacGregor, yet another courageous explorer to reach the summit. These four “views” capture a different, mid-century side of the mountain. We see, above all else, the impact of tourism on a mountain now reopened to Brits, engendered by the popularity of Romantic poetry, increased railway travel, and a notion that the Swiss Alps were conducive to Protestant encounters with God. In these views, the sublime has been swapped for l’heure bleue, that crepuscular moment of alpenglow, enjoyed in the company of fellow explorers.
The four prints hold together as a progressive narrative of ascent. In the first, titled “The Glacier du Tacconay”, we see three vibrantly illustrated explorers hauling a fourth out of a deadly crevasse. In the background, two dozen figures are also present, but they have been completely desaturated, as if they are slowly merging into their icy environs. “Leaving the Grands Mulets” uses the same effect, but depicts a descent from pineconey peaks. A final print titled “The Summit” captures the heady exhaustion of a successful submit. A couple of explorers raise schnapps-sized glasses on a rounded dome of snow, while two others have almost collapsed from exhaustion.
Beyond their visual impact, the prints came with a description that contains its own form of literary experimentation, demonstrating the waning influence of Romanticism on mountaineering. The preface focuses less on the individual, heroic explorer, more on collective expeditions and technical achievement. “Mules, guides and porters; ropes, knapsacks and ice axes; provisions, blue spectacles, firewood, gaiters, and iron-spiked shoes; —alpenstocks, green veils, and snow gloves (like large little babies’ gloves with a thumb and general finger).” There is a fun interplay between life and art, as if the painter might provide a kind of protection that crampons cannot. “See how the treacherous ice breaks: but the oil brush has just caught that falling man in time.” And we find a humorous acknowledgement that the mountain is now overlaid with the heavy impact of human life. “The spasmodic and quick repeated sound, ‘’ppahh,’ ‘’ppahh,’ of fifty smokers on Mont Blanc—could anybody sleep under it?”


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Joseph Perry’s Medical Illustrations of Miscarriage (1834)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Nov 23, 2021

On an unrecorded day in 1827, a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy suffered her sixth, perhaps seventh miscarriage. In the remarks written on her case, it is said that she endured three premature losses for every two successful pregnancies, and “her general health was greatly impaired” in the process. Most likely, she labored between her sweat-soaked and blood-soiled bed sheets, with a midwife watching nearby. Maybe it was a warm morning, in a small home where the walls grew slick with condensation. Heavy breathing and humidity. Maybe the breath was hers, hurried, alongside that of several children huddled outside in the hallway. Maybe her husband kept as close as he could, grave with concern. Or maybe, after so many consecutive losses, he was left feeling almost unfazed. One thing is certain, the woman and the midwife went about their painful work. And when, with a final push, the gestational sac, embryo, and placenta were passed, the midwife promptly collected them and took leave. She hurried through the streets of London until she reached the workplace of the Italian doctor and author, Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783–1872). In the midst of perfecting his book, Graphic Illustrations of Abortion and Diseases of Menstruation, Granville summoned his engraver, Joseph Perry, to perpetuate these particular tissues of miscarriage in detailed, undiminished lithographic color. It now bears the title: Plate 2, Figure 12.
Granville’s book is full of illustrations with similarly grim origins. Published in 1834, the terms abortion and miscarriage were still used somewhat interchangeably within the medical community. Granville himself asserts that his book deals solely with the losses that were spontaneous, a symptom of deeper illness or physiological dysfunction, and not those intentionally induced. Compiled over the course of roughly six years, it consists of twelve plates and upwards of forty figures. Figures which, in spite of the fact that fetal illustrations in utero were no longer particularly rare, are infused with a fantastical air of artistry.
As part of his introduction, Granville makes note of Dr. William Hunter, author of Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures (1774), a compilation of black and white drawings based on the study of pregnant corpses. Hunter’s publication is extensive, intricate, and intimately detailed. Yet the monochrome, realist reproductions suffer from a starkness that Perry somehow circumvents. Most notably, Granville and Perry refrain from including illustrations of the women who died during troubled labors. Their bodies, rather than being nakedly displayed, are untouched by Perry’s pencil beyond the reproductive organs. Perhaps it is this focus on the isolated world of the embryo and fetus that makes each image feel so elusive, so aesthetically alien. And perhaps Granville reveals his affinity for this style when he quotes a fellow doctor: “It must be allowed that the generality of these things (the aborted ova) are preserved for their beauty, or as a matter of curiosity, rather than of use”. The illustrations become more than medical specimens, they are mementos, envisioning the organic beauty of the human body, as well as its brutality.
To modern viewers, the context of medical confusion adds an extra layer of mystery to each image. Plate 1 is a compilation of floating amniotic sacs, suspended in water so as to preserve their three-dimensional shape during dissection. Leached of color, the layered membranes appear dark, arcane, and orbicular. Green-tinged tissue hangs off their surface like tendrils of moss. In Plate 4, we are confronted by a nebula of nearly indiscernible matter. Potentially the reproduction of a rare molar pregnancy, this illustration strives to show tissue layered in dangerous excess. Still more plates present a fetus nestled secretly in a woman’s left fallopian tube. Or resting, in almost tranquil repose, on the outside of her uterus. In this way, every image is an opportunity to investigate the beliefs and misunderstandings of nineteenth-century obstetrics.
Each illustration is supported by a wealth of medical text: Granville’s explanations and remarks on the various cases he has encountered. The more elaborate these excerpts become, however, the clearer it is that Granville himself was still struggling to elucidate several aspects of reproduction. Given that most medical research up to this point was conducted on corpses, it is not surprising that there was lingering confusion over the act of conception. Granville acknowledges that fertilization takes place after sexual congress, but remains curiously quiet about the male’s role in this process, due to the contested role of spermatozoa in this period. He does, however, make frequent mention of Karl Ernst von Baer, a German scientist who served as a professor of zoology and anatomy at Konigsberg University. Baer had recently published Ovi Mammalian at Hominis genesi (1826), a book outlining his discovery of the mammalian ovum. It is clear then that Granville recognizes the female egg as a source of life, but he hits another scientific hurdle when he writes that fertilization of this egg takes place in the ovary rather than the uterus. Evidently, the mystery of conception still eluded explanation.

author: Paloma Ruiz


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The Holkham Bible Picture Book (ca. 1330)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 20, 2022

In 1816, William Roscoe — a Liverpudlian banker with an eye for art — wrote to Thomas William Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, in awe. The men had history. Forty years before, Coke inherited the library at Holkham Hall, which had been assembled, a century earlier, by his grand uncle Thomas Coke (1697–1759), whose family sent him abroad at fifteen to break a nasty cockfighting habit. It worked. By the time this elder Coke was twenty-one, he had plundered Padua, Lyons, Berlin, and most places in-between, buying “enough manuscripts and early printed books to form one of the finest private libraries in England”. After inheriting the library in 1776, Thomas Coke found it in a sorry state, with priceless books mildewed and pockmarked by worms. He sent nearly 750 volumes to Liverpool, where Roscoe had them cleaned and rebound. Now, in 1816, Roscoe was helping Coke grow his collection further by sourcing rarities from abroad. On offer was “a very curious MS. just brought here from the Continent. . . which I think one of the greatest curiosities I ever saw”.
Thought to have been made in London, ca. 1330, this “curiosity” is now known as the Holkham Bible Picture Book, for it selectively illustrates the Old and New Testaments, taking us from Genesis to Revelation in a series of 231 beautifully executed miniatures. Among the many gleaming images we see: Adam and Eve on the outskirts of paradise, while a cherubim guards Eden’s gates with a carbuncle-colored sword; the flood, where Noah sends out dove and raven above a choppy sea — rendered in rolling streaks of blue and white — while the pale bodies of a man, woman, and horse sink into endless sleep; and the last supper, in which Christ and his apostles’ robes seem to coruscate on the page. The Holkham Bible’s miniatures knowingly employ luminance, an effect with both aesthetic and theological significance, through the technique known as “tinted drawing”. Making practical use of the translucent quality of vellum, these images were produced by applying paint in thin layers, preserving the material’s opacity and, in the right light, making it glow like a cathedral’s stained glass.
We know very little about the original purpose of this book, beyond that the events are given a contemporary, medieval setting: the English agricultural “Plough Monday” is believed to be referenced in a depiction of Cain; coif caps abound; and Roman guards wield weapons and don armor distinctly Middle Aged. The Bible may have been commissioned by a Dominican friar, for the manuscript begins, unusually, with a friar commanding his artist to “do it well and thoroughly, for it will be shown to important people”. While it is referred to as a Bible, the relationship between text and image throughout is atypical, as the words often serve to caption the events depicted, rather than reproduce sacred text. Throughout this trilingual manuscript, written mostly in Anglo-Norman, English plays a minor but important role. The language only appears when connected to shepherds. In a humorous and cryptic miniature (f. 13), the annunciation gets lost in translation: “Gloria in excelsis”, intones the angel, but the shepherds do not speak Latin. “Glum glo. . .”, attempts one man, in a sloppy and guttural imitation, before admitting that he’s babbling nonsense (“ceo ne est rien”).
A second scene on the same page shows the shepherds reaching the manger, where they look upon Mary, Joseph, and the child Christ. Suddenly, their speech transcends the limitations of language: these pastoral figures now sing perfect Latin, from scrolls that unroll off their tongues. “That shepherds at first cannot sing Latin is expected”, writes Richard K. Emmerson, “that they later can, is miraculous”. More miraculous still, Middle English codeswitches with Anglo-Norman in a style that recalls macaronic song. “Songen alle wid one steuene / Also the angel song that cam fro heuene: [Middle English] / ‘Te deum et Gloria.’ [Latin] / La contenance veyez cha [Anglo-Norman]”. As Christopher Baswell explains, this “musical, angelic Latin might well be the language of revelation” — what this bible’s wealthy, Anglo-Norman reading audience would expect — yet “the unique and explosive appearance” of Middle English works to authenticate the scene in a vernacular language that was gradually gaining literary and clerical prestige. “They all sang in one voice” (Songen alle wid one steuene) describes the choric song, but it also seems to point forward, toward the future of writing in England.


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The Human Voice (1921)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 21, 2021

This silent educational film from Bray Studios is all about that “marvellous sound producing instrument, the voice box”. Produced six years before the introduction of “talkies”, there's something pleasingly odd about a film dedicated to the mechanics of the human voice being entirely devoid of its subject matter — where the voiceover would soon boom we are treated to just the poignant silence of intertitles. Founded in 1912, Bray Productions was initially devoted to making animated series, including Max Fleischer's marvellous Out of the Inkwell series. During World War One, the studios moved mainly into producing education and training films, but its roots in animation were not forgotten and the technique was employed heavily in their new mission to explain and instruct. The Human Voice utilises a range of animations, often combining them with filmed footage of a man's head to reveal the subdermal mechanisms at play, and at one point we take a slightly terrifying “trip down ‘Throat Lane’” to find an animated glottis in song behind an overlaid stave.

author: Adam Green


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Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 8, 2021

Few seasonal activities are as universal — across time, place, or culture — as the snowball fight. As many of us head into the cold, winter months, hoping for a holiday season with frosted trees or icicles dripping like stalactites from the eaves of homes, we might also long for that slightly slushy grade of powder that makes for perfect packing. Snowmen and angels can be created later. And perhaps there will be sledding: on toboggans (for connoisseurs) or cafeteria trays (for the crafty). Yet nothing signals the year’s first snowfall quite like an apple-sized projectile cutting a parabolic path — through crisp evening air, the haloed light of streetlamps, and exhalations of foggy, illuminated breath — to make direct contact with an unsuspecting hat or coat.
And yet, like snowballs themselves, which vanish upon impact into a mist of flakes, or melt on a hesitant mitten, which has missed its opportunity for ambush, snowball fights rarely last more than a few volleys (before dispersing toward cocoa) and are rarely preserved beyond the fleeting memories of individuals, friends, or families. But certain significant battles make it into the annals of history. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, as the saying goes, the Battle of Austerlitz may have been planned on the snow banks of La Brienne. According to what might be more fable than history, the teenage Napoleon Bonaparte famously organized a ten day snowball fight at this military school, complete with trenches, regimens, and rules of engagement (although, according to his classmate Bourrienne’s memoirs, the combatants eventually worked their way down to gravel and stones beneath the snow, until “besiegers as well as besieged, were seriously wounded”) .
University magazines tend to preserve storied skirmishes on quadrangles. A particularly pyrrhic 1891 battle at Smith College in Massachusetts was still being debated in the women’s college’s monthly magazine half a decade later. When University of Edinburgh students engaged local residents in a salvo of hard-packed lobs, a battle broke out that lasted two days, now known as the 1838 snowball riots, which led to violent suppression by armed police (brandishing weapons heavier than frozen water) and dozens of arrests. In protest, students quickly published an extensive (and, in parts, extremely insensitive) piece of campus humor titled The University Snowdrop. “The noblest theme of the noblest poets, in all ages, has been WAR”, begins the preface, before advancing the thesis that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were “the evident result of a snow-ball fight at the village of Troy in Asia Minor”.
While narratives and poetry might recreate the arc of engagement, the visual arts can freeze the scene of a snowball fight for all time. Some of the earliest, preserved images of snowball fights come from medieval books of hours — illuminated, devotional manuscripts with calendrical elements — and almost always feature on pages dedicated to the month of December. Later, we find snowballs as details in larger landscapes. In Lucas van Valckenborch’s majestic Winterlandschaft (1586), airborne orbs mix with heavy snowfall represented by palette-knife impasto across a village scene. What’s wondrous about browsing the images gathered below is how little changes across centuries and continents — like landscapes blanketed with powder, difference fades in the snow fight. A fifteenth-century fresco from Trento, Italy, reveals combatants with arms cocked back (and one unfortunate recipient of a headshot), wearing expressions of minorly-sadistic pleasure or intentions for revenge — postures nearly identical to Utagawa Kunisada (I)’s woodcut snowball scenes (ca. 1825) or to those of the schoolchildren in mass combat depicted by Fritz Freund’s nineteenth-century The Snowball Fight.
Subthemes emerge in the snow-fight genre: the ball about to be launched at an unaware target, such as in Anthonij van der Haer’s mid-eighteenth century engraving, and the angry aftermath of ambush, as seen in a 1904 print from Springfield, Massachusetts captioned “Whose afraid”. There are often invocations of the viewer, either as teammate — such as the jolly, beckoning baller in Cornelis Dusart’s Maart (ca. 1690) — or as opponent, as in a heavily-colored photograph from 1920s Norway of a girl in Sámi dress playfully threatening whomever meets her gaze. And, like in all sport, there are politics and wargames. A photograph from 1923 captures a snow battle between Democrat and Republican page boys in front of the US Capitol building, while a 1946 photograph, shot from an overhead angle, records members of the Women’s Army Corps entrenched against some unseen rivals.
If there is a chance of snowfall in your part of the world, we wish you good aim and fast reflexes this holiday season.


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Theresa Babb’s Photographs of Friendship (ca. 1898)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 16, 2021

Camden, Maine is one of two places on the East Coast “where the mountains meet the sea”, writes Barbara F. Dyer, a local historian. Photographing its harbor and hills at the turn of the twentieth century, Theresa Babb (1868–1948) recorded both the intimacies of social life and her hometown’s industrial and seafaring traditions. What stands out most about Babb’s images is how they let us glimpse into a personal world of female friendship, captured in such a way that seems both timeless and strikingly modern.
In The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, Marilyn Yalom describes the rise of the “new woman” in the late-nineteenth century, whose education, race, and class position created “a new model of friendship” that was “to last for much of the twentieth century”. She quotes a woman interviewed during this rise: “We live for our friends, and at bottom for no other reason.” Babb’s portraits do not fall neatly into this history, but certainly share the quoted sentiment. The groups of women she photographed are neither fully focused on the ennobling, moral uplift associated with “the serious New Woman” nor anticipatory of the “carefree flapper” that was to follow. Instead, we find joyful depictions of friendship among women, often on countryside outings, during a decade in US history remembered as “the gay nineties”. In the image above, Babb and three friends drink, heads thrown back, while lounging on a rocky shore. A fifth woman stares off toward the water, either comically posed in feigned disapproval or simply lost in thought. Several other images continue the theme, reflecting the pleasures of posing in groups. In a photograph captioned “Camping crowd at Ogier Point”, four women lean on each other, pulling faces for the camera; another image depicts friends and family of Babbs stacked on a ladder, with her sister, Grace Parker, on top.
Babb’s chosen angles make these 120-year-old images feel remarkably contemporary. Photographing “some of Miss Garland’s girls” in Milton, Massachusetts in 1900, Babb places her camera near to the ground and eight women, seated on grass, peer down toward the lens. In another image, young people swim in the sea, while Babb seems to be floating on a boat, with her camera trained back toward shore. The activities are numerous: dancing, picnicking, dog walking, dinner parties, photography, bicycling, child care, hammocking, and naps on the beach are all represented. Spending time with these images, we start to feel as if we know Theresa Babb. And yet, in terms of biographical information, we know very little. Her husband was the treasurer of Knox Woolen Mill, Charles W. Babb, and her son, Charles Jr., succeeded in the family business, becoming President of the mill. On the envelopes that house the negatives of these photographs, Theresa Babb wrote detailed captions, small missives to some future onlooker.


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Clavis Artis by “Zoroaster”
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 30, 2021

Much like the images it contains, the three-volume Clavis Artis remains a mystery of nearly unchartable depths. We know this much: the alchemical manuscript was published in Germany, sometime between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, although its title page claims it is thirteenth century (and written on dragon skin). Few copies exist and even fewer are illustrated — and one was incinerated, as if by dragon’s breath, during the 2004 fire at Weimar’s Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek. The authorship is unknown, but the manuscript declares itself to be a translation of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra): the ancient Persian prophet and founder of the Zoroastrian religion. The images focused on in this post come from a copy of the manuscript held at Trieste’s Biblioteca Civica Attilio Hortis, while another version — with illustrations of almost identical content but in a less “naïve” style — can be found at Rome’s Lincean Academy (or, reading its Italian name literally: the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed).
Even the most keen-eyed and erudite occultist may find themselves adrift in these dense, hermetic images. Part of the reason for this, aside from thematic content (infanticide, a nude woman using a crescent moon like a proto-hovercraft, and scenes that look — to a contemporary viewer — like interspecies French kissing) stems from the illustrations’ nearly unparsable tone. In perhaps the most disturbing image, two mustached soldiers hold children upside down over a well, using long daggers to filet their legs. The men seem posed for our gaze. A kneeling woman observes, hands clasped, perhaps in prayer, but her face may easily be read as rapturous. Dragons, lions, and serpents appear frequently across the manuscript and the alchemical symbols for elements and planetary metals often graffiti the landscape, with mercury (☿) coming to the fore. In a somewhat comical scene, a man (possibly Zoroaster himself) looks to the sky, concerned, as a shooting star approaches a brick tower with flames blazing from its chimney. Distracted by the heavens, it appears that the man has momentarily forgotten that he is feeding some kind of giant lizard, perched on a pedestal, greedily guzzling carmine liquid from a rounded decanter.
Guity Novin, in her History of Graphic Design, quotes the eighteenth-century English occultist Francis Barrett, who links Zoroastrianism and alchemy — present most palpably in the Clavis Artis through everpresent primordial dyads: light and dark, fire and water, sun and moon (often personified): “Zoroaster was the father of alchymy, illumined divinely from above; he knew every thing, yet seemed to know nothing; his precepts of art were left in hieroglyphics, yet in such sort that none but the favorites of Heaven ever reaped benefit thereby”. Like the second half of Barrett’s description of Zoroaster, we seem to know almost nothing about this manuscript, but the scholarly history is young. The edition held in Rome was rediscovered by the composer Nino Rota (who scored Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather) in an antiquarian bookshop in the 1970s. The mysteries seem only to proliferate when it comes to the Clavis Artis.
You can browse images from the Trieste copy below and see those from the Roman copy here (the latter set).


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“When London is in Ruins”: Gustave Doré’s The New Zealander (1872)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 26, 2021

Famous for depicting worlds beyond our own — his illustrations of The Divine Comedy are inseparable from how we now view Dante’s epic — the French artist Gustave Doré (1832–1883) set himself a new task in 1869: to document the scenes of everyday London life. Collaborating with the British journalist Blanchard Jerrold (1826–1884), Doré spent countless days and nights drifting across the capital, protected by plain-clothes police, while visiting opium dens, squalid lodging houses, and dim pubs. After four years, the pair published London: A Pilgrimage, complete with 180 wood engravings by Doré.
Critics were not kind in their reviews of the volume, because many felt it was itself not a kind review of London: depicting extremes instead of medians, working in the tradition of William Hogarth’s city scenes, but draining them of moral and satirical content. Critiques aside, there is a more curious history to uncover here. In the final plate, Doré slips into a metaphysical mode, depicting London in a ruinous style that looks more like John Martin’s illustrations of Pandemonium than a lively city on the Thames. London Bridge has fallen down and, in the midst of this unreal city, a veiled figure sits lit by moonlight, aside the derelict “Commercial Wharf” — where sedge has begun to rewild the urban environment — sketching the remains of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which looks like it has been snapped in half. Its title? “The New Zealander”.
This image frames the entire series. Writing in his preface, Jerrold quotes Wordsworth and lapses nostalgic: the pilgrimage was conceived “in the happier days of France, when war seemed nearly as far off from Paris as the New Zealander appears to be still from the ruins of London bridge”. Who was this New Zealander? Largely forgotten today, he was so omnipresent in the 1860s as to be labeled cliché. An 1865 issue of Punch magazine, for example — explored by both David Skilton and David Runciman — proposed banning the use of “certain persons, objects and things, part of the stock-in-trade of sundry literary chapman”. At the head of this list we find “Macaulay’s New Zealander”: “The retirement of this veteran is indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when London is in ruins.”
The trope is often traced back to the British statesman and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), for whom the vision of a fallen London in some near future served as a cautionary bit of rhetoric repurposed toward various ends. In an 1829 review of Essays on Government by James Mill, for example, Macaulay describes a vision akin to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Is it possible that, in two or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities—may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?” In 1840, he narrowed these cities to London during a review of Leopold von Ranke on papal history, contrasting the New Zealander with the endurance of Catholicism amidst cataclysm: unlike London’s iconic Anglican cathedral, the Catholic church “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's".
Although Doré was likely referencing this version of the New Zealander, the allegorical figure did not necessarily originate with Macaulay. The New Zealand based Cornish missionary William Colenso, presenting a paper at the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute in 1882, found an equivalent image in “works, without doubt, [that] Macaulay must have seen and even read”. Horace Walpole, for instance, in a published 1744 letter, suggests a time when “some curious traveller from Lima, will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the Editions of Baalbec and Palmyra”. (Colenso notes that Macaulay wrote “a slashingly trenchant” review of Walpole’s letters.) Other predecessors include Volney, Henry Kirke White, Percy Shelley, and — demonstrating the depth of Colenso’s sleuthing — “the able preface to the English 4th edition of La Billardiere’s celebrated Voyage”, which predicts that “New Zealand may produce her Lockes, her Newtons, and her Montesquieus. . . [and send] navigators, philosophers, and antiquaries, to contemplate the ruins of ancient London”. Others think the origin might come from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1825), a work about London even less popular than Doré and Jerrold’s Pilgrimage, which envisioned the capital flattened by the Napoleonic wars.
Controversial in origin, the image becomes even more complex when trying to fix an interpretation, as its meaning permutates beyond Macaulay. Consider Winston Churchill, who, commenting on ancient civilizational ruins in India, wondered if “the traveler shall some day inspect, with unconcerned composure, the few scraps of stone and iron, which may indicate the British occupation of India.” Part of the New Zealander’s enduring pleasure, then, comes from a kind of Ozymandian irony, fully present in the Churchill — “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yet wait long enough and, sure enough, despair will decay into something like bathos.
More curious, perhaps, is the New Zealander’s journey from colony to metropole, which plays on the tradition of educated and moneyed Europeans capping their studies with a Grand Tour to see the ruins of classical civilization. It also predicts, in a sense, the anxieties of “reverse colonization” that fester in the British imagination across the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prominent in alien invasion narratives and employed for dramatic effect by Louise Bennett Coverley, for instance, in her 1966 poem “Colonization in Reverse”. The science fiction novel most indebted to Macaulay’s idea is William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880), written in an epistolary style from Tapuaeharuru, Taupo, N.Z. in 1942, looking back at the fall of London to pollution and vice. In Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (2021), Nikki Hessell further complicates questions of fiction and history, by tracking how an extract from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) was published by Rēweti Tūhorouta Kōhere as a bilingual text in 1926, designed to introduce anglophone literature to Māori readers, and perhaps inspired the kind of travel envisioned by the statesman. Against the critical tradition that perceives Macaulay’s New Zealander to be a settler returning to a collapsed imperial center, Hessel notes that, in the 1840s, the term would have invoked a Māori pilgrim. “Macaulay’s Māori was mobile, traversing not only the geographic space between England and Aotearoa New Zealand and the temporal space between the flourishing empire and its inevitable fall, but also the cultural space between Indigenous and European art forms.”


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Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 12, 2022

In the introduction to Elaborations on Emptiness (1996), Donald S. Lopez, Jr. recounts a Japanese story called “Miminashi Hōichi”, about a blind biwa minstrel who can recite the epic thirteenth-century Tale of Heike by heart (a chronicle that exceeds eight hundred pages in its English translation). One day, the young man is approached by the servant of a lord, who asks to hear the concluding episode performed, wherein the last samurai of the Heike bloodline is executed — a segment alone that requires seven nights of recitation. His first six installments are a great success. But before the final session, it is discovered that the blind singer was tricked: he has not been visiting a noble temple in the evenings, as he thought, but an empty graveyard, where the ghosts of the Heike clan have been listening to the painful history of their demise. Like Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, who must tell stories to stay alive, the boy realizes that when his tale ends, he too will die. To save him, local monks paint the Buddhist Heart Sūtra across his body, which makes him invisible to the ghosts. But the monks forget to calligraph his ears. That night, the spectral samurai slice his lobes to shreds, leaving only holes, and thus the blind bard became known as Miminashi Hōichi — Hōichi the Earless.
It is hard to find a moral in this stomach-churning scene. Yet it reflects a belief regarding the Sūtras and other texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism: what these words mean may be just as important as what they can do: offer protection, through apotropaic invocation, and grant enlightenment. “It was agreed among many Buddhist scholars”, writes Claudia Marra in reference to Japanese Buddhism, “that Sūtras, even if not understood, but recited with faith, would eventually lead to enlightenment, since only the language of the Sūtras had the power to cut through illusions and enlighten the faithful”. The bloody climax of “Miminashi Hōichi”, then, may reflect — in graphic and physicalized terms — not only the armoring power of sacred language, but also the Heart Sūtra’s primary theme: cutting through the illusory nature of perception and knowledge itself.
If incantatory texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism work through recitation, are the illiterate barred from enlightenment, should they lack the supreme linguistic recall of Hōichi? The answer requires knowing more about literacy and language in Japan. The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early-modern era, with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sutra recitation (dokyō) becoming an artform in the following century. Charlotte Eubanks tells the story of Emperor Goshirakawa, who supposedly incinerated a wing of the imperial palace after mispronouncing “a single character of the Lotus Sutra”.
This is to say, even for the literate, the Buddhist scriptures could be vast palimpsests of code-switches and calques. First of all, most East Asian canons of sacred Buddhist texts — known as Tripitaka and venerated by practitioners in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan — have long been written in Classical Chinese. As Greg Wilkinson notes, for those who can read this Tripitaka, the canon’s lack of punctuation, the tonal requirements of Chinese, and the presence of Sanskrit transliteration, makes it “very difficult to understand for a Japanese reader without special knowledge and training”, and almost as difficult to pronounce “correctly”, given the variation in dialects and vernacular speech across the archipelago.
In order to circumvent these issues in the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable, akin to how the emoji sequence 👁 🅰 ◀ 🚍 approximates the phonetics of “I read a rebus” (I + “red A” + “re” + “bus”). Famously, the Japanese physician, scholar, and travel writer Tachibana Nankei (1753–1805) reproduced an early example of a Heart Sūtra for the illiterate in his 1795 Travelogue of East and West (Tōzai yūki).
As these texts were often most used in rural, agricultural regions, the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death. “Villagers, decoding these pictures and pronouncing them aloud in their local dialect”, writes Eubanks, “would thus produce sounds similar to those pronounced by educated clerics”. Furthermore, the presumed incantatory and magical power of an esoteric teaching, in a nearly incomprehensible language, coupled the sounds and promises of spirituality to the visual realm of everyday life.
The rebus-style text featured at the very top of this post, held by the British Library, dates to the early twentieth century, demonstrating the continued relevance of this reading technology across a modernizing Japan. It is labeled by the British Library as an edition of the Heart Sūtra (Hannya shingyō), but the Library of Congress, which holds a copy of the same text, names it as the “Hymn of Praise to Kannon for the Illiterate” (Kannon mekura wasan). Although the bodhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteśvara), who embodies compassion, offers teachings in the Heart Sūtra, this hymn (wasan) is distinct from the Heart Sūtra as well as the other sutras rendered according to this rebus-principle, such as the Lotus Sūtra.
Below, you can browse pages from a much earlier Heart Sūtra for the illiterate (ca. 1800), courtesy of Williams College. Also, on the theme of religious rebus texts, check out this 1908 pictographic bible designed for children.


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Designs from Kimono Pattern Books (ca. 1902)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 3, 2021

“Kimono”, which translates to “wearing thing” in Japanese, is both a modern invention and a millennium-old style. Becoming the kimono we know today only during the Meiji period (1868–1912), this garment, details Cynthia Green, developed from the Edo kosode, which, in turn, was a revised form of clothing popular during the Heian period (794–1192). In these images from three pattern books published by Honda Unkindō (ca. 1902), we glimpse both evolving tradition and modern fictions, which imbued the kimono with complex associations of national heritage.
These particular books were printed following a late-nineteenth century boom in Kyoto kimono production, for use as guides by both consumers and designers. As Terry Satsuki Milhaupt describes in her study of the modern kimono, this was an era when the kimono’s symbolic association with “traditional Japan” became explicit, due, primarily, to the Meiji government relaxing the Edo period’s stricter social hierarchy and isolationism. With increasingly porous social and international borders, fashion underwent an upheaval as Western clothing rapidly became a shorthand for modernization. Against this backdrop, the kimono also modernized, but its modernism presented as tradition. When government officials began to wear suits and uniforms, “Kimono-clad females emerged as symbols of cultural continuity and preservers of the nation’s sartorial heritage”. As is often the case, national mythmaking was built on the back of global exchange. The newfound textile technologies used to produce these heritage-heavy garbs became possible thanks to Japanese delegations collaborating with the United States and Europe to research dyeing technologies.
Bound in the fukurotoji style on stitched double leaves, the pattern books consist of coloured woodblock prints, which represent designs attributed to Ueno Seikō, a practitioner of yūzen-style dyeing. This process is a subclass of “resist dyeing”, which uses rice-paste to form a sticky outline, giving shape and pattern to the applied colour. While yūzen is a practice that stretches back to the eighteenth century – when it first allowed for pictorial designs to be laid directly onto fabric – kata–yūzen, in which dyed paste is applied through stencils, was only perfected toward the end of the nineteenth century. With this new process, derived from intellectual collaboration with scientists from other nations, kimono production could be increasingly industrialized.
If these design albums exhibit a certain aesthetic flare, it may have emerged from brotherly competition. During the period in which they were produced, the Unkindō publishing company — known by this name from ca. 1889, though an offshoot of the Honda family’s longstanding book-binding business — entered a tradecraft rivalry with the Unsōdō company, also of the Honda family. After these relatives merged their companies in 1906, the publisher’s pattern books became self-conscious works of art. As Teruko Hayamitsu, a curator at the still-extant Unsōdō company, writes: “They focussed on works for the kimono industry, producing lavish publications which used not only traditional colour woodblock printing but also cutting-edge technology of the day such as collotype-printed photographic plates and heliotype colour plates.”
Produced just before the merger, when competition was fierce, these images evince refined woodblock techniques and complex, decorative grammars. One catalogue makes extensive use of abstraction and negative space, with maple leaves falling in patterns from a salmon-colored sky and cranes taking flight out of a lightless sea. Two other catalogues dial back the abstraction into small, stirring scenes of the natural world. Here we see themes reminiscent of ukiyo-e — fractal, geometric water patterns; snowy boughs spread from a serpentine trunk — and festive repetitions of speckled paper fans.
Below you can see a selection of highlights from the three pattern books digitised by the Smithsonian, and you can see another held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here.


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Robert Browning attempting to recite ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ (1889)

Mar 16, 2012

The voice of great English poet, Robert Browning (1812 - 1889) recorded while at a dinner party given by Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, on April 7th, 1889. The sales manager of Edison Talking machine, Colonel Gouraud, had brought with him a phonograph to show the guests and to record their voices. Browning, though reluctant at first, eventually gives in and begins to recite his poem 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'. Unfortunately, he "cannot remember me own verses" and gives up going on to expressing how he certainly won't forget though this "wonderful invention". He was to die just under 8 months later. When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave."
I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he;I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;'Speed' echoed the wall to us galloping through...'Speed' echoed the...Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest...
I'm terribly sorry but I can't remember me own verses,but one thing that I shall remember all me life is the astonishing [inaudible] by your wonderful invention.
Robert Browning!
[other voices]Bravo, bravo, bravo.Hip, hip, hooray.Hip, hip, hooray.Hip, hip, hooray.Bravo.


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Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)

Apr 3, 2012

This Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice, released on 7 February 1914, was only Charlie Chaplin's second ever appearance on film and the screen debut of his famous Tramp character. Although it was the first film released involving the Tramp, Chaplin had actually devised the outfit for the film Mabel's Strange Predicament produced a few days earlier but released a couple days after Kid Auto Races at Venice, on 9 February 1914. Mack Sennett had requested that Chaplin "get into a comedy make-up". As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography:
I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born.
In The Kid Auto Races at Venice Chaplin takes the Tramp to the races where he annoys a director, who is trying to film there, by continuously trying to sneak into shot.


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The Selection Of Type Is Just As Important As The Selection Of Words (1939?)

Feb 27, 2012

An "Alphabetical Index to Type Faces" from the G.A. Davis Printing Company. What it says on the tin, but also generator of bizarre 'accidental' sentences such as "Summer-time with outdoor pleasures become flowers with nature", "Domestic animals are nuisance when a hurry to men", "Strong type faces used cold north winds" and the occasional poem: "History repeats itself as the years pass / Internal injuries are weakening / Injurious statements make yonder river flows fast".
NB: The publishing date of 1900 given in the Internet Archive link appears to be incorrect, with some of the typefaces not being invented until the mid-30s. There is no indication of publishing date on the scanned copy itself, though there is a Library of Toronto stamp dated October 1939.


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Lucy Isabelle Marsh

Mar 1, 2012

American singer Lucy Isabelle Marsh (1878 – 1956) made her career as a professional recording artist for the Victor Talking Machine Company. She was an anonymous mainstay of the regular recording program of the company from 1909 into the late 1920s, while at the same time, she quickly won popular and critical recognition under her own name as a major artist on Victor recordings. (Wikipedia)


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Original Acrostics on all the States and Presidents of the United States, and Various Other Subjects (1868)

Feb 21, 2012

As well as acrostics for all the states and presidents, Robert Blackwell provides ones for a host of other topics including the Moon, Whisky and the Ladies of Nashville. And just in case you thought it is was easy work, a little note from the author...
[Gentlemen.]
GRANT me one favor, I ask no more,Examine all my writings o'er;Not forgetting all the timeTis hard to make a name to rhyme.Let those who think they can composeExcellent verse as well as prose,Make one effort to be wise,Ere they scoff and criticiseNumerous works they would revise.


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The Beatus of Facundus (1047)

Apr 9, 2012

In the 8th century, in a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, 700 years after the Book of Revelation was written, a monk named Beatus set down to illustrate a collection of writings he had compiled about this most vivid and apocalyptic of the New Testament books. Throughout the next few centuries his depictions of multi-headed beasts, decapitated sinners, and trumpet blowing angels, would be copied over and over again in various versions of the manuscript. Below is a selection of images from one such manuscript known as the Beatus de Facundus (or Beatus de León), dating to 1047 and painted by a man called Facundus for Ferdinand I and Queen Sancha. It is composed of 312 leaves and 98 miniatures.
John Williams, author of The Illustrated Beatus, explores more in his article for The Public Domain Review, "Beatus of Liébana".


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Some Account of a Sheep Having a Monstrous Horn Growing from His Throat (1755)

Apr 9, 2012

An account of the presenting before The Royal Society in London of a sheep which had a gigantic horn growing out from his neck.


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Dog Factory (1904)

Feb 15, 2012

A rather dark and bizarre Edison short. Two men are operating a 'dog factory', using a device that they call a Dog Transformator. A man brings three dogs into their shop, which they purchase from him. They place the dogs one by one into the machine, which turns each dog into a string of sausages. As their customers come in, they are then able to select the kind of dog that they want, and the machine changes the corresponding string of sausages back into a dog.


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Photographs of the Famous by Felix Nadar

Mar 7, 2012

Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1 April 1820, Paris – 20 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. He took his first photographs in 1853 and pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris. Around 1863, Nadar built a huge (6000 m³) balloon named Le Géant ("The Giant"), thereby inspiring Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon. Although the "Géant" project was initially unsuccessful Nadar was still convinced that the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines. Later, "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" was established, with Nadar as president and Verne as secretary. Nadar was also the inspiration for the character of Michael Ardan in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. In April 1874, he lent his photo studio to a group of painters, thus making the first exhibition of the Impressionists possible. (Wikipedia)
For more photographs by Nadar see source below.


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An Account of a Fire-Ball, Seen at Hornsey, by William Hirst (1753)

Apr 9, 2012

"I was then going down the hill adjoining to the south side of Hornsey-church, and was not a little surprised to find myself suddenly surrounded by a light equal to that of the full moon, though the moon (which was then four days old) had been set about fifty minutes."


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A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (1907)

Apr 4, 2012

A book detailing the science behind harmony, balance, and rhythm in art.  The author, Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), was an American painter, art collector, and professor of art at Harvard University. From the preface:
The terms and principles of Art have, as a rule, been understood by the artist in the form of technical processes and visual images, not in words. It is in words that they will become generally understood. It is in words that I propose to explain them in this book. I want to bring to definition what, until now, has not been clearly defined or exactly measured. In a sense this book is a contribution to Science rather than to Art. It is a contribution to Science made by a painter, who has used his Art in order to understand his Art, not to produce Works of Art. In a passage of Plato (Philebus, ^f 55) Socrates says: "If arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken out of any art, that which remains will not be much."


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Illuminated pages from 15th century Breviaries

Mar 19, 2012

A breviary (from Latin brevis, 'short' or 'concise') is a liturgical book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church containing the public or canonical prayers, hymns, the Psalms, readings, and notations for everyday use, especially by bishops, priests, and deacons in the Divine Office (i.e., at the canonical hours or Liturgy of the Hours, the Christians' daily prayer). Below is a selection of illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century.


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Musaeum Clausum (1684)

Apr 10, 2012

In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of ‘remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’. His list of desired items includes an ostrich’s egg engraved with a scene from the battle of Alcazar, a ring found in the belly of a fish (reputed to be the ring of the Doge of Venice with which he annually weds the sea), the mummified body of one Father Crispin of Toulouse, and ‘Batrachomyomachia, or the Homerican battle between frogs and mice, neatly described upon the chizel bone of a large pike’s jaw’.


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The Battle of San Pietro (1945)

Mar 8, 2012

Documentary directed by John Huston who was commissioned by the US army to record their efforts to take Italy in the Battle of San Pietro Infine in 1943. The US Army ended up refusing to show the film because it was too honest in its portrayal of the high cost of battle and the difficulties faced. Huston and his crew were attached to the US Army’s 143rd regiment of the 36th division. Though a few scenes seem to be have been reconstructed outside of actual fighting, unlike many other military documentaries Huston’s cameramen did film alongside the infantrymen as they fought their way up the hills to reach San Pietro. These cameramen were in just as much danger as the soldiers on the ground, often within a few feet of mortars and shells exploding and bullets ricocheting nearby. The film is unflinching in its realism and was held up from being shown to the public by the United States Army. Huston quickly became unpopular with the Army, not only for the film but also for his response to the accusation that the film was anti-war. Huston responded that if he ever made a pro-war film, he should be shot. Because it showed dead GIs wrapped in mattress covers, some officers tried to prevent troopers in training from seeing it, for fear of it upsetting morale. General George Marshall came to the film's defense, stating that because of the film's gritty realism, it would make a good training film. The depiction of death would inspire them to take their training seriously. Subsequently the film was used for that purpose. Huston was no longer considered a pariah; he was decorated and made an honorary major. (Wikipedia)


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Plates from Spiegel’s De formato foetu liber singularis (1626)

Apr 2, 2012

Giulio Cesare Casseri, also known as Casserio, was born in about 1552 in Piacenza. His father died when he was young leaving his family poor, so when he attended medical school at the University of Padua he did so as the servant of another student. Later he was a servant to the noted Fabricius ab Aquapendente (ca. 1533-1619), whose chair in surgery and anatomy Casseri later filled. He was especially known during his lifetime for his research into the anatomy of the speech and auditory organs. In about 1600, he began work on an anatomical atlas covering the entire human body, which he still had not completed at the time of his death in 1616. In fact, it has been conjectured that Fabricius stopped its publication in 1616 because of a rivalry between the two.
Adriaan van de Spiegel, sometimes known as Spigelius, was born in Brussels in 1578. After studying medicine and philosophy in Louvain, he went to the University of Padua to study medicine under Casseri and Fabricius. Becoming an expert in anatomy, surgery, and botany, Spiegel made a name for himself practicing in Germany, Hungary, and Moravia. In 1616, he was appointed to the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua after Casseri's death, and he died in that city on April 7, 1625.
At the time of Adriaan van de Spiegel's death, his son in law, another physician named Liberale Crema (fl. 1626) edited Spiegel's unillustrated anatomical text, De formato foetu liber singularis. To accompany it, he obtained nine copperplate engravings which Casseri had created either for a work on general anatomy or one specifically on fetal development. The plates are the work of Titian's student Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), and engraver, Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560); the same artist and engraver who created Casseri's plates for his anatomical magnum opus which were published with Spiegel's text, De humani corporis fabrica libri decem (Venice, 1627).


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Hand Book of the Carnival, Containing Mardi-Gras, its Ancient and Modern Observance (1874)

Feb 21, 2012

Fascinating little book offering a brilliantly detailed insight into the 19th-century New Orleans Mardi-Gras tradition, including a history of the Mistick Krewe of Comus, The Twelfth Night Revellers, and The Knights of Momus.
From Wikipedia: In Greek mythology, Comus or Komos (Ancient Greek: Κῶμος) is the god of festivity, revels and nocturnal dalliances. He is a son and a cup-bearer of the god Bacchus. Comus represents anarchy and chaos. His mythology occurs in the later times of antiquity. During his festivals in Ancient Greece, men and women exchanged clothes. He was depicted as a young man on the point of unconsciousness from drink. He had a wreath of flowers on his head and carried a torch that was in the process of being dropped.


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35mm Stock Footage

Mar 21, 2012

A fantastic new collection titled "35mm Stock Footage" has recently been uploaded to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Digitized into HD from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Much of the footage is "process plates" -- film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies. Here we have included a few highlights from the bunch - above: miniature shots of a flooding river carrying away a model house and a small plane crashing in the jungle - below: various war related footage including beautiful shots of a convoy of tanks crossing a river at night under fire, and beneath that aerial footage of military planes in flight (with some athletes running round a track sneaking in at the end).
We also recommend checking out the outtakes from these early shorts.


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Natural History of Shakespeare; Being Selections of Flowers, Fruits, and Animals (1877)

Mar 13, 2012

Collection of little snippets from Shakespeare's plays pertaining to the natural world: Garden Flowers, Wild Flowers, Weeds, Trees, Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Spices and Medicines, Grain, Birds, Animals, Fish, Reptiles, and Insects.


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An Alphabet of History (1905)

Mar 27, 2012

"Who frets about the mystery / Enshrouding all of history / On reading this will, maybe, see / We've made it plain as ABC." From Alexander The Great, "a victim of fate", to Zenobia, "the empress of Palmyra" - an illustrated ABC set to verse of history's big players (at least as envisaged in 1905).


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Stack O’ Lee Blues - Ma Rainey (1926)

Apr 9, 2012

Ma Rainey (1886–1939) was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues. She began performing at the age of 12 or 14, and recorded under the name Ma Rainey after she and Will Rainey were married in 1904. They toured with F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels and later formed their own group called Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. From the time of her first recording in 1923 to five years later, Ma Rainey made over 100 recordings. Some of them include, Bo-weevil Blues (1923), Moonshine Blues (1923), See See Rider (1924), Black Bottom (1927), and Soon This Morning (1927). (Wikipedia)


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Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly (1919)

Mar 9, 2012

Max Fleischer (1883–1972) was a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations. One of these was the Rotoscope, a technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement frame by frame. The technique was used to create his "Out of the Inkwell" series for Bray Studios. (Wikipedia)


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Life and Passion of Christ (1903)

Apr 6, 2012

From Internet Archive: La Vie et la passion de Jesus Christ is a 1903 French silent film directed by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and is believed to be the first feature film to have colorized sequences. Colorization was achieved using the Pathecolor/Pathechrome stencil-based film tinting process, which had been invented around 1903 by Pathe Freres, one of the most important and innovative film companies in history. The film itself is a straightforward telling of the story of Jesus Christ, but does include some events usually omitted in films about Christ, like the Transfiguration. La Vie is filmed using a single camera mostly kept still in front of the set and capturing the actors and action as it unfolds. The only known cast members are Madame Moreau as Virgin Mary and Monsieur Moreau as Joseph.


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Poet and Peasant Overture played on the Banjo (1925)

Apr 8, 2012

"King of the Banjo" Eddie Peabody with a rearrangement for the banjo of Franz von Suppé's "Poet and Peasant Overture" originally dating from 1846.


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Alice in Wonderland (1915)

Mar 22, 2012

1915 silent film adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, directed and written by W.W. Young and starring Viola Savoy as Alice. This is a tinted and shorter cut of the film. There is an untinted longer version (though lower quality) here. Included above are two versions: the film without sound or the film with a nice soundtrack added by the original Internet Archive uploader (though be aware that the copyright info on the early vinyl recording used is unknown).