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A Vanishing Nova: Uranographia Britannica (ca. 1749)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 6, 2022

In 1748, scientific instrument maker John Neale advertised the sale by subscription of a new “exact Survey of the Heavens”. It would offer not only “all the fix’d Stars hitherto observed in any Part of the World”, but also two planispheres of the Ptolemaic constellations and a historical account of the asterisms, “from the earliest Antiquity to the present Time”. The atlas relied on the work of Dr. John Bevis (1695–1771), a London physician who had devoted a year of his life to recording the nightly transits of stars from his observatory in Stoke Newington. Documenting faintly luminous entities down to the eighth magnitude, he added to those already cataloged — by John Flamsteed’s 1729 Atlas Coelestis and Edmond Halley’s southern hemisphere observations — for a total of 3550 stars.
Best known to historians of astronomy for discovering the Crab Nebula (depicted in Taurus), Bevis contributed papers on eclipses and comets to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, making strides toward establishing the configuration and scale of the solar system, and helping to account for apparent irregularities in the motions of the moon and planets. At a time when the accurate measurement of longitude was of paramount importance to imperial British navigation, Bevis played a prominent role in the assessment of contending claims.
Its size better suited than previous mammoth atlases for use with a telescope, the ambitious Uranographia was positioned to become astronomy’s state-of-the-art geographical guide to the heavens. The first atlas to use only English (not Latin) names for all the constellations, it may have also been the first to depict Uranus, and demonstrated scientific innovation through its representation of “not-so-fixed-stars”. Along with its astronomical significance and artistic beauty, Bevis’ Uranographia marks an important watershed in the history of celestial atlases: it was among the last to show allegiance to the old animated mythology of the heavens. Though a thoroughly modern astronomer, Bevis still adhered to the classical constellation figures in all their graphic glory. Johann Bode’s 1801 Uranographia largely copied Bevis’ depictions, but his representation of a new constellation, Globus Aerostaticus, as a Montgolfier balloon was a harbinger of ancient star worship's full displacement from the scientific field.
In 1750, John Neale went bankrupt and the unreleased Uranographia Britannica was sequestered for decades by the London Court of Chancery. Had the atlas reached its subscribers, whose names appear in dedications below each plate, the Uranographia Britannica would have been one of the greatest working star charts produced during the Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas. Although Bevis was widely admired in British scientific circles as a sanguine gentleman, it was said that “he never again referred to his great atlas without showing a deep and bitter sense of loss”. Bevis died tragically in 1771, after falling from his telescope while measuring the Sun’s median altitude.
Below you can browse, thanks to Wikimedia Commons, twelve hand-colored zodiac constellations from Uranographia Britannica. A complete, uncolored edition — featuring the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, two planispheres, and a chart of the southern constellations — is available courtesy of Linda Hall Library.


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Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1757–95)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 12, 2022

The essayistic introductions of Harris’s List, an annual digest purporting to review and catalogue sex workers in Georgian London, did not shy away from castigating moralizers. The 1765 edition begins by claiming that “Ladies of Pleasure are public benefits”, while painting opponents of prostitution as zealous believers in the sentiment that, as versified by Matthew Prior’s Paulo Purganti and his Wife (1708): “The Nation ne’er will thrive, / Till all the whores are burnt alive”. Extinguishing this disgusting, incendiary charge, the author asks his readers to consider the Ancients, especially Horace’s anecdote about Cato the Elder, who congratulated a punter, upon exiting the brothel, for sequestering his lust away from “the wives and daughters of their neighbors”. Harris’s List shifts this praise from patron to provider. Commending prostitutes as the guardians of a harmonious polis, the List suggests that “the whole conduct” could be legalized or “regulated by rules”, urging “both Laws and Magistrates [to] be kind to those public-spirited Nymphs”. “Do we not owe to them the peace of families, of cities, nay of kingdoms?” asks the 1787 edition. “What villainies do they not prevent? What plots, what combinations, do they not dissolve? . . . What a miracle!”
If some may see in these enthusiastic calls for decriminalization an echo of modern-day approaches (as practiced, for example, in the Netherlands), any trace of social progressivism wanes after this introductory foreplay gives way to the lists themselves. In format, these works present a bizarre melange of travel writing, guide books, yellow pages, and cheap erotica — reportage dissolves into racy fiction with the intent to “amuse and entertain the reader”, writes Sarah Toulalan. We encounter hundreds of barely redacted names, services rendered (using euphemisms such as “the Maypole of Love”), street addresses and prices, biographical information, employment history, and lengthy reviews of women and their temperaments. Miss Ph-llis of Tavistock Court is a “fine crummy plump-made dame”, specializing in the “elderly gentleman”, while Miss C-rb-tt of Bridges Street’s skin has a whiteness that “surpasses the new-fallen snow” and a heart comparable only to “Juno Queen of Heaven”. Others are treated far less kindly: Miss Th-m-es of Bow-Street is “too lusty and fat, but her limbs are exquisitely well turn’d”; the body of Mrs. Cl-l-nd of Swallow Street, who hails from Scotland, gets transformed through blazon into a highland landscape, whose “mountain, at the top, is not always destitute of flowers”; and Miss C-ll-ns of Oxford Street, formerly employed as a cow-keeper, has her lovemaking ridiculed with literary conceits, not to be repeated here, related to dairy farming and butter churning. ※※Indexed under…Butterchurning as sexual innuendo
Reading both the praise and admonishment of particular sex workers, we begin to sense that the fundamental desire of the List’s author is less sexual than textual: his prose brims with awkward literary allusion and frequently tips into a purple register encumbered with stock similies. Miss N-wc-mb of King’s Place prompts an outburst borrowed from Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713): “I’m lost in extacy. / How shall I speak the transports of my soul?” Mrs. D-x-n has breath “like the fragrance of new mown hay”, while “Cupid has called forth his choicest arrow of the amorous kind to warm” Miss Ke-t of Tottenham Court Road, and there is “no one fitter” than Lambeth’s Mrs. B-nn-r “to initiate the young officiating priest in the deepest mysteries of his office.” Risqué metaphors are italicized throughout the list as if to announce their innuendo to even the most unimaginative mind. After Mrs. P-tt-rs-n, through the voice of our author, communicates her preference for elder clients (who give her “the longest pleasure”), she describes how “the eagerness and impetuosity of youth make the transports mere momentary . . . furnished with a profusion of the coin of love, they pay the liquid toll almost as soon as they have entered the gate; nay, sometimes at the very portal”.
As historical documents, the surviving editions of Harris’s List — originally published in print-runs of roughly ten thousand copies — offer today’s readers a rare (though partial) glimpse into the sex trade of eighteenth-century London. While the Scottish statistician Patrick Colquhoun once estimated that 50,000 women, either partly or wholly, “resorted to Prostitution as a livelihood” by 1800, the British Library puts the number closer to six or seven thousand. The lists’ authorship remains opaque: it is possible that Jack Harris, a tavern waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head — who styled himself “The Pimp General of All England” — began the project, while Samuel Derrick took over the task in later years, continuing to use the Harris name for titillation. Published annually between 1757 and 1795, Harris’s List had precursors, such as The Wandering Whore (1660), which included a list of London’s “Crafty Bawds”, “Common Whores”, “Maiden-sellers”, “Night walkers”, and others who, according to this text, abided by the dictum that “mony and Cunny are good Commodities”. Yet Harris’s List proved the most popular example of this genre and has had a considerable afterlife: leading to spinoffs in other British cities, such as Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh (1775), and inspiring, by way of Hallie Rubenhold, BBC’s Harlots.
In addition to raising questions about historical veracity and the politics of sex, reading Harris’s List reveals the potential violence of its form. In his 1996 essay “I’ve Got a Little List”, novelist William H. Gass writes that “the list detaches objects from their place in the world and enumerates them elsewhere”. Something similar happens here: body parts are isolated from their person, emotions decontextualized, and the amorous techniques of “ladies of pleasure” perversely reduced to a checklist for the male reader’s amusement.
Above you can browse the 1787 edition of Harris’s List, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. The 1765, 1783, 1786, 1788, 1789, 1793, and 1794 editions are available through their respective linked dates.

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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Unnatural Selection: Emil Schachtzabel’s Pigeon Prachtwerk (1906)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 15, 2022

Those who deign to class pigeons as “rats of the sky” have clearly never seen a Pigmy Pouter. Nor, for that matter, a silver Jacobin, named because its ornate headdress (composed of a “hood”, “mane”, and “chain”) resembles the cowl worn by a sect of Dominican monks. Another breed of pigeons are actual nuns, cousins in kind to horsemen, barbs, dragoons, finnikins, and runts. As fanciful as their titles, the diverse appearance of these birds makes one wonder how they can all be classed as pigeon. The bug-eyed Budapest tumbler barely resembles the peacock-like fantail, the cropper, which can balloon its breast to softball proportions, or, indeed, the bizarre frillback, which, at first glance, appears tangled in a mass of perm-treated hair. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Darwin was substantiating his theories of artificial and natural selection, the pigeon served as a proving ground. “Among all the domesticated animals, the pigeons were the most divergent and yet the most clearly related to a single ancestor”, writes James A. Secord. Poised on “a classificatory edge”, they became a “perfect case study in the power of selection”.
Citing Darwin by name in his reference book, Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen, Emil Schachtzabel came of age in the paradigm-molting wake of On the Origin of Species (1859), a work in which pigeons play a significant role. A government administrator by day, Schachtzabel’s passion for the bird led to an appointment as president of the Federation of German Poultry Breeders (Bund Deutscher Rassegeflügelzüchter). Yet he remains best known, perhaps, for his Prachtwerk. The lithographs from this work collected below, based on watercolor templates by Anton Schöner, illustrate the seemingly limitless boundaries of domesticated pigeons, as several birds intrude beyond their frames into the margins of the page. Pigeon cultivation weds artistry, Schachtzabel explains, with the manipulated mechanisms of evolution. Describing how marvelous combinations of feathers, shading, and color have emerged through the efforts of the pigeon’s protector — “the thinking man” (den denkenden Menschen) — he ponders what features might appear in future breeds, hoping his book will serve as inspiration.
Schachtzabel combined two knowledge traditions that had not always overlapped: the practical wisdom of pigeon fanciers and the taxonomical theories of naturalists. As described in the Prachtwerk’s preface, Schöner positioned his lithographic pigeons at carefully chosen angles to give the fancier a better sense of golden proportions, toward which his or her own breeds could strive. Schachtzabel’s introduction, on the other hand, recognizes that turn-of-the-century fancying had been reinvigorated by advances in infrastructure — as postal, train, and shipping networks created new opportunities to obtain “fresh material” (frisches Zuchtmaterial) for crossbreeding. Just a few decades earlier, however, it was rare for fanciers to discuss the biological history of their prized columbiformes. “Fanciers almost unanimously believe that the different races are descended from several wild stocks”, wrote Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), “whereas most naturalists believe that all are descended from the Columba livia or rock-pigeon”.
While many may associate the evolutionary biologist with Galapagan finches, critics and editors had tried to trim the wings of his On the Origin of Species before publication. Reverend Whitwell Elwin, who assessed the manuscript, calling it a “wild & foolish piece of imagination”, wrote to the publisher John Murray suggesting that Darwin limit his treatise to the pigeon content: “Every body is interested in pigeons. The book would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom, & soon be on every table.” Darwinian evolution may owe as much to the HMS Beagle as to a certain gin palace near London’s Borough Market, where the scientist would observe seasoned members of a pigeon club and their specimens. What gripped his mind was the diversity of color and aspect, the spectrum that Schöner would try to capture on the page. If the fanciers were to be believed, and these numerous, domestic breeds were crosses of kaleidoscopic aboriginal stocks, why had ornithologists only observed rock-pigeons in nature, which look far more like our feral city pigeons than any polychromic rarity? The answer, toward which Darwin was homing, involves genetic mutations, selected for by breeders who favored a flashy phenotypic expression. Yet every flamboyant breed descends from the same drab and common species — Columba livia.
That is to say that next time you see a street pigeon, beak deep in a half-eaten kebab, know that its DNA contains a pallet richer than any painter’s dream, which — with a few centuries of strategic mating — could appear in the plumage of birds yet to come.


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The Stream of Time (1803–58)
Text by Jo Livingstone
Apr 20, 2022

In his foundational textbook Elements, the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid defined a line as “breadthless length” — a thing with only one dimension. That’s what lines can do to history when used to plot events: they condense its breadth into pure motion, featuring only those people and places that serve as forces thrusting it forwards along an infinite axis. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Strass proposed a different way to visualize time’s flow. A Prussian historian and schoolteacher, he published his chronological chart in 1803, a massive diagram titled Der Strom der Zeiten oder bildliche Darstellung der Weltgeschichte von den altesten Zeiten bis zum Ende des achtzehnden Jahrhunderts (The stream of the times or an illustrated presentation of world history from the most ancient times until the eighteenth century). The linear timelines that Strass resisted, like those inspired by Joseph Priestley, “implied a uniformity in the processes of history that was simply misleading”, write Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg. Strass’ stream, by contrast, allowed historical events to “ebb and flow, fork and twist, run and roll and thunder”. It would spawn several imitations as the century drew on.
In Der Strom der Zeiten, Strass depicts human history from the year of “creation” (around 4000 BCE) to the “present day” through metaphorical bodies of flowing water. Working with the hodgepodge mixture of Biblical, classical, and imperial accounts of world history, his chart begins with large, vague springs like “Chinese” and “Assyrian”, which themselves have no precursor, while Europe flows forth from the exclusive roots of Italian and Greek civilizations. It’s a partial account of the deep past, extremely ethnocentrist, and therefore more of a map of what early-nineteenth century German-speaking people happened to think about history than anything else. As Holger Berg puts it, the historiographical context was “decidedly German or, to be more accurate, Hanoverian”.
Strass was working in a tradition of general history, also known as allgemeine Geschichte or historia universalis, which sought knowledge on a global scale. This ambitious universalism was true of most disciplines founded in the eighteenth century at the great English, French, and German institutions. Ideas about knowledge forged in this era are still the air we breathe. It is difficult to step outside of an idea like “science”, for example, to see what is constructed about a word like “scientific”. But, in Germany in particular, general history after 1760 aimed its efforts toward a “systematic” account of the past.
When the English writer William Bell published his translation and expansion upon Strass’ ideas in 1810, he was astonished that “the image of a Stream should not have presented itself to anyone” previously working on historical diagrams. It had an inherent liveliness, in his opinion, which matched with our experience of time itself. “The expressions of gliding, and rolling on; or of the rapid current, applied to time, are equally familiar to us with those of long and short”, wrote Bell, referring to simpler, line-based charts. Moreover, water springs up, surges, and dwindles, making it an apt metaphor for the “rise and fall of empire”. Strass’ rivers may allow the past to snake and curl, but they are relentlessly focused on the progression of power, according to Bell. A people’s history this is not:
[Strass’ chart’s] diversified power, likewise, of separating the various currents into subordinate branches, or of uniting them into one vast ocean of power; of dispersing them a second time, but still in such a manner that they are always ready under the guidance of some great conqueror to converge again into one point, tends to render the idea by its beauty more attractive, by its simplicity more perspicuous, and by its resemblance more consistent.
Although Bell thought such diagrams livelier and more beautiful than a simple timeline, the accompanying images are peculiar-looking. The less saturated versions of the chart appear almost tuberous, the rivers bulging in the rhizomatic style of a root vegetable, like ginger. Édouard Hocquart produced a rather more stylish version of a similar view in his 1830 Panorama de l'Histoire Universelle. The typography is elegant, and the diagram plots a tasteful combination of pink, yellow, and various shades of green against slate. More garish, and even more striking, is an 1849 version of Strass’ diagram hand-colored in jewel tones by English publisher C. Smith & Son.
Strass’ own writing shows how attempts to create universal systems can lead to idealization. In the introduction to his Handbuch der Weltgeschichte (1830), he romanticizes people from the past into a kind of homogenous spirit of history, a man whose being transforms alongside the technologies he lives amongst. Like his Strom der Zeiten charts, which charm the eye with their peculiarity, Strass’ portrait of an aristocratic Europe, whose chivalric values were withering, now seems more picturesque than analytical. His systematic analysis is rendered defunct, even bizarre, by the changing standards of information graphics and ongoing changes to the definition of the word “history”. If “streams of time” initially promised to widen the breadth of linear history — allowing it to meander across space as well as time — our modern-day eyes are perhaps drawn to the banks and blank spaces in these maps: the stories covered by the waters of their “universal” system.

author: Jo Livingston


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James Sowerby’s British Mineralogy (1802–17)
Text by Elaine Ayers
Mar 3, 2022

On December 13, 1795, a fifty-six-pound meteorite fell from the sky into an English quarry. Wondering if it had “come from some volcano in the Moon”, the landowner turned this lump of multi-colored minerals over to James Sowerby, a well-connected scientific illustrator and naturalist. Sowerby published an extensive account of what became known as the “Yorkshire Meteorite” in his five-part mineralogical handbook, inviting pushback from geologists who thought that including a “Phaëton from the heavens might seem absurd in a work on British Mineralogy”. Since the curious object contained substances commonly found within mines of the British Isles, Sowerby believed the meteorite belonged in a volume primarily devoted to more mundane earthbound subjects, such as table salt and oxygenized carbon.
Comprised of more than four hundred vividly hand-colored engravings of various rocks, minerals, and compounds, British Mineralogy saw the Royal Academy-trained illustrator depart from his focus on botany toward non-living specimens. Pledging to leave “no stone unturned” in communicating to both laypeople — farmers, miners, and surveyors — and a growing class of gentlemanly mineralogists interested in theories of evolutionary transmutation, Sowerby tried to bridge ever-growing cleavages in geological communities during a time when the age of Earth was hotly disputed. Geologists adhering to “Volcanian” and “Neptunian” theories of planetary origin might, at long last, “shake hands together”, if provided with detailed illustrations of every known British “species” of rock and mineral. By referencing these dueling ideologies, which argued that the Earth was born either out of fiery eruption or biblical deluge, Sowerby positioned his work at the center of a debate that held enormous stakes far beyond the realm of geology.
Catastrophism — the idea that the origins of Earth and the transmutation of species have been shaped by sudden, often violent events — dominated early-nineteenth century scientific debates about evolution and extinction. Embraced, by some, as a way of reconciling biblical beginnings with increasingly common discoveries of fossilized bones that pointed to a decidedly non-Christian view of the world, the set of layered theories attempted to integrate mass extinction with ongoing transmutation. Sowerby, who was deeply committed to public scholarship, refused to weigh in on the religious implication of his geological work, saving it for later texts on less “controversial” subjects. Seemingly circumspect in his own beliefs, Sowerby gestured towards, while never fully engaging with, profound conversations between science and religion.
Despite his scientific leanings, James Sowerby was first and foremost an artist. From his intricately detailed accounts of fungi and shells to his 1809 A New Elucidation of Colour Theory (dedicated to none other than Isaac Newton), the naturalist was concerned with translating three-dimensional, colorful, and sometimes ephemeral objects to the flat surface of the page. Adept in describing and demonstrating how complex questions of perspective, scale, and color functioned in individual objects, Sowerby’s observational eyes and deft hands were remarkable for the time and continue to work as standards within scientific illustration. The illustrator’s rocks and minerals were, at once, geometric objects and geological proofs of the Earth’s age.
By the 1830s, geologists had largely replaced catastrophic origin theories with “uniformitarian” ideas of gradual change. These ideas were most clearly articulated in geologist Charles Lyell’s enormously popular and oft-revised Principles of Geology, a scantily illustrated text that formed the sediments of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Sowerby, for his part, continued to add natural-historical specimens to his private collections while building a familial legacy of scientific collecting and illustration that lasted for generations. As Sowerby’s disciple John Mawe wrote in his public-facing Familiar Lessons on Mineralogy and Geology, the magic and mystery of mineralogy, from meteorite to table salt, lay in its multiple identities, spanning audiences and consumers. Rocks and minerals, in all of their mundanity, held beautiful and sublime lessons about the world for specialists and non-specialists alike — a beauty that Sowerby was devoted to capturing through illustration, and a beauty that continues to capture illustrators and designers more than two centuries later.
Find below highlights of plates from all five volumes. You can see the first four volumes at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the full set at e-rara. Also check out this wonderful hand-copied selection from Sowerby's work made in 1840 by a woman named Martha Proby.

author: Elaine Ayers


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“A Sword was Seen in the Sky”: A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 27, 2022

We hear with the greatest Astonishment, that near Riga in Livonia, has been seen in the open Sky, a fiery Rod, which struck about it, and the Points of the Rod were full of blood. Four great Swords stood at the Stary Heaven, which very often vanished, and soon appeared again; they did strike together like Flashes of Fire round a House it was frightful to behold. Likewise was to be seen with Horror, a pretty large Coffin, which was covered with three Dead heads; also a Pyramid and Serpent.
So opens the first of two accounts detailing unusual phenomena seen in the skies over Riga and Kirschberg (near Gdansk) in 1763. Published by Mannheim-born Philadelphia printer Anton Armbruster the following year, this short pamphlet was a translation of a German broadside titled Zwei wahrhafte von gantz besondrn Himmels–Zeichen. Why this translation for Philadelphia? Such strange news from Prussia would have likely appealed to the city's many German immigrants, but there was maybe more to Armbruster’s publication.  Despite occurring across the other side of the world, such ominous signs from a wrathful God unhappy with a wayward populace, could speak to the citizens of the much-embattled Pennsylvania Province.
The year of 1764 was a troubled time for Philadelphia. After Armbruster’s former business partner Benjamin Franklin had, in early February, turned back the Paxton Boys vigilante mob on their way to murder Susquehannock Indians, a pamphlet war broke out in the City of Brotherly Love. Nearly a quarter of the seventy-plus pamphlets either excoriating or apologizing for the Paxton gang’s violence were printed on the press owned by Benjamin Franklin and operated by Armbruster. Did the latter then take a break from the ongoing provincial war of words to issue a transcendental warning to Philadelphians?
“These are the ForeBodings of the Creator, which go before Punishment”, a sky-born Youth in white proclaimed to the “Multitude” near Riga amid the thunderous lightning and apparitions of swords, snakes, and skulls. In the town of Kirschberg outside Gdansk, a three-day sail from Riga along the Baltic's southern shore, similar vengeful scenes were reported in the skies. For a full forty-eight hours the tempest’s fiery red clouds alternately closed and opened to reveal a cannon and swords, along with three angels enjoining citizens to quit their vice and unrighteousness or “GOD will punish you very quick.”
The particular Himmels-Zeichen — heavenly signs — illustrated in Armbruster’s translated and reprinted jeremiad were typical of seventeenth and eighteenth-century apocalyptic broadsides. But they would soon be on the wane, thanks to philosophes like Franklin who were making great strides in replacing the old Aristotelian meteorologia — the study of things on high, generated by both the four elements and divine intelligences — into Meteorology, the nascent quantitative natural historical science of weather. With his research into lightning, waterspouts, whirlwinds, and other weather events in the 1750s, Franklin had done more than anyone else to engender the shift from miraculous celestial signs to the laws of the gaseous atmosphere.
An avid practitioner of folk magic — especially the wildly popular divinatory pastime of “money digging” — Armbruster’s own allegiance lay squarely with the past. Stories were told of how the “Grand Master” (as he was known) had a “special charm for raising and laying the devil, and would frequently arise, at midnight, and spread out a large sheet of whimsical drawings which he possessed, and surround it with four or five candles.” In 1765, after a bitter election saw Franklin, a royal government advocate, tossed from the provincial assembly by disaffected German voters and while Pontiac’s War still raged on the western frontier, Armbruster published a broadside in German and English, An Account of a Surprising Phoenomenon, Which Appeared in the Sky at the City of Philadelphia and Different Parts of Pennsylvania, on Saturday the 2d. Of February 1765. Bearing a slightly reworked version of the 1764 woodcut, the broadside gave his own eyewitness account — “A Meteor appeared to the writer as if three armies were in conflict” — of the very local Himmels–Zeichen. Perhaps this time Armbruster’s prognostication was on the mark; just seven weeks after the “meteor” streaked through Philadelphia’s sky, the British Parliament and King George III issued the Stamp Act, setting in motion the events that would be known as the American Revolution.

author: Kevin Dann


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Ostentatio Genitalium in Renaissance Art
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 14, 2022

Ostentatio genitalium (the display of the genitals) refers to disparate traditions in Renaissance visual culture of attributing formal, thematic, and theological significance to the penis of Jesus. That these images seem to have been created in good faith, with pious intentions, mystifies art historians, and many refuse to recognize the category as noteworthy or distinct from the nudity of angels and putti. Yet, as examples accrue, the conspicuous attention lent to Christ’s phallus cannot escape even the most disinterested gaze. “It is no exaggeration to say that this has probably been the most taboo topic in Christian thought for two thousand years”, writes Stephen Sapp. In contrast to classical sculptural conventions, which — with exceptions like certain herma and statues of satyrs — often showcase male genitalia in a state of flaccid modesty (akin to Michelangelo’s Risen Christ), these Renaissance images shock us because they are so frequently ithyphallic: Christ has risen, but not in the way we have come to expect.
Beginning around 1260 and enjoying widespread employment before finally tapering off in the seventeenth-century, ostentatio genitalium reversed a Byzantine tendency to depict Christ as sexless, his missing organs covered by flat, diaphanous veils. This was a symbol of purity and perfection, following from Augustinian notions that untimely erections are reminders of Adam’s “sin of disobedience”. Yet in the ostentatio genitalium tradition the opposite seems true: it is the visual virility of Christ that affirms his divinity. The natural question to ask, after blinking our eyes, would be why? How do practitioners of a religion, whose seven heavenly virtues include prudence and temperance, decide to venerate, for centuries, an apparently prurient vision of their savior?
There are many theories for the question of origins. Some point to the growing influence of Franciscan devotion in the thirteenth century, which came with the slogan nudus nudum Christum sequi (“naked to follow the naked Christ”). Others place less emphasis on the reproductive organs and rather see this representation as part of the Renaissance trend toward anatomical naturalism. (This trend was occasionally taken to extremes, in art and in life: Pietro Aretino — the influential sixteenth-century Italian author charged his contemporaries to “consecrate special vigils and feast-days in its [the penis’] honour, and not enclose it in a scrap of cloth or silk”.) And it is tempting, in a period of European history where Greco-Roman civilization was “rediscovered”, to try and connect the representation of holy turgidity with pagan precursors: the Garden of Priapus, bacchanalian rites, Pan and his pastimes.
Leo Steinberg, who coined “ostentatio genitalium” in his famously controversial study of the phenomenon (1983), thinks this last temptation is a misstep. Questions about the sexuality of Christ were not imported from the past, but emerged organically out of mystical queries concerning the Incarnation: when God emptied himself of divinity and assumed a mortal form. “Delivered from sin and shame”, writes Steinberg, “Christ’s sexual member bespeaks that aboriginal innocence which in Adam was lost.” Or rather, Christ’s perfection is capable of redeeming imagery more-often associated with temptation and vice than religious piety.
Even more surprising than the content of these paintings is the fact that this theological symbolism was accessible to numerous engravers, painters, and audiences. It’s a surprise that speaks, perhaps, to a kind of oblivion: the modern world’s “massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity”, a context in which these images were once legible. For Steinberg, the ostentatio genitalium tradition trades on a “erection-resurrection equation”, which allowed a viewer to access the holy mystery of “mortified-vivified flesh”. We find a prominent example of this “equation” in several works by Dutch painter Maerten van Heemskerck with the title Man of Sorrows, which show a resurrected, stigmata-ridden Christ, whose loincloth reveals far more than it conceals. In images where fabric successfully clothes the Son of God, the proliferation of flowing material can become a charged substitute, such as in Wolf Huber’s Allegory of Salvation (ca. 1543), where a limp serpent hangs lifeless on a distant cross, while Christ’s perizoma plumes.
The “discovery” of ostentatio genitalium has been admired and criticized by numerous scholars. One shortcoming in arguments seeking to prove the coherence of this genre arises from a lack of evidence: many artworks that might support the theory have been bowdlerized, with Christ’s body covered or modified in acts of iconoclasm and reformation. And while the images collected below all seem, with varying demands on the imagination, to highlight Jesus’ genitals, we will never be sure why. Caroline Walker Bynum, one of Steinberg’s most prolific interlocutors, cautions that acts and artworks which, for the twenty-first century viewer, seem singularly sexual, once had expanded, theological connotations. Consider, for instance, the late medieval tendency to depict Christ birthing [8] an allegorical figure of the church from a stigma between his ribs, as if the wound — created by his penetration by the Lance of Longinus — were connected to a womb. Or, as Bynum recounts, when Catherine of Siena had a vision of Christ using his foreskin as a wedding ring, “she associated that piece of bleeding flesh with the eucharistic host and saw herself appropriating the pain of Christ.” The communion with Christ’s body — an act erotic, Eucharistic, both, or more — offers a visual vocabulary that remains irreducible to any easy explanation.


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Earthen Messages: Nikola Tesla in his Laboratory (ca. 1899)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 29, 2022

It becomes more and more difficult to answer a neglected message as time ticks on. You have broken the circuit of communication, kept your correspondent in the lurch. Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, “the man who invented the twentieth century”, reignited his correspondence with friend and mentor William Crookes in an arresting way. On a photograph of himself seated beneath a giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing twenty-two-foot-long bolts of electricity, Tesla inscribed: “To my illustrious friend Sir William Crookes of whom I always think and whose kind letters I never answer!”
Too busy to return letters, Tesla was hard at work making the medium obsolete. In “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, the 1900 Century Magazine article for which this double-exposure photograph was originally staged, the inventor describes how his “mind was dominated by the idea of effecting communication to any distance through the earth or environing medium”. Tesla had hit on the idea of a planetary messaging platform, for both tellurian and extraterrestrial recipients, which would consume decades of his life. Why fuss with laying telegraph cables (or power lines) if the earth itself could deliver electrical signals of varying strengths to a specific addressee?
The Century photograph marks a period of cultivated publicity in Tesla’s life. Having outgrown his New York laboratory, which, according to biographer Marc Seiffer, was “vulnerable to fires and potential spies”, the Serbian-American electrician decamped for Colorado Springs. Here he had previously created “hyperbolic headlines” by successfully transmitting the ballad “Ben Bolt” between two earth-connected autoharps, leading the public to believe he knew how to tap a power reserve within the planet’s mantle. In Colorado, he would build a research center at the invitation of attorney Leonard E. Curtis, who had supported Tesla during the “war of the currents”: when Thomas Edison’s DC power was pitted against George Westinghouse, the licensee of Tesla’s patents for alternating current (AC). Before leaving New York, Tesla publicized his new research departure in Electrical Review, where he was shown holding a 1,500 candlepower lightbulb — wirelessly powered by a version of his eponymous coil — apologizing to the reader “for the frequent appearance of my likeness in these photographs, which is distasteful to me, but was unavoidable”. Unavoidable and strategic: Tesla needed support for an oscillator strong enough to “talk to the inhabitants of the planet Mars”, a technology that would hopefully allow him to realize “one of my fondest dreams; namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wire”. Soon after, thanks to free electricity from the El Paso Electric Company, he would indeed intercept what he believed to be Martian communication — the letter “S” in Morse code — which happened to be the same message Guglielmo Marconi was broadcasting during contemporaneous radio experiments between England and France.
In the 1890s, when Tesla began to conceive of a “World Wireless System”, the air crackled with voice. Cordless communication was a hallmark of the future, and the future seemed to be speaking itself into existence. While Marconi increased the range of his radio broadcasts exponentially during the decade, borrowing generously from Tesla’s own research, both men had wireless precursors. During the 1860s, the dentist-inventor Mahlon Loomis is thought to have sent an electrical current between two kites flying eighteen miles apart, while Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone in 1880. A precursor to fiber optics, the device relied upon sunlight to transmit audio. “I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!” Bell told his father after the breakthrough, announcing, to his wife Mabel’s chagrin, an interest in naming their second daughter “Photophone” in celebration. Reliant on light, however, Bell and Tainer’s system suffered a communications blackout at each day’s dusk.
While Bell and Tainter focused on sunlit communication, Tesla was trying to rewire Earth’s relationship to the solar system. Like James Clerk Maxwell’s “demon”, he sought to overcome the second law of thermodynamics. “Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall return”, Tesla writes in “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, the subtitle of which promises “special reference to the harnessing of the sun’s energy”. He composed his speculative treatise after a commission by Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century, who begged him “not to write a metaphysical article, but rather an informative one”, and sent Dickenson V. Alley to Colorado to take promotional photographs.
The photographs served their intended purpose, illustrating a twelve-thousand-word essay where Tesla did everything but shy away from metaphysics. In order to combat the inevitability of entropy, he offers various visions of the future: global demilitarization through a version of mutually assured destruction, the liberation of humans from their reliance on food, and a theory resembling the many-worlds interpretation. Along the way, Tesla champions wind and solar power as superior to coal, dreams of machines powered solely by gravity and frictionless engines. At the center of his future is a device related to the “magnifying transmitter”, which would be capable of wirelessly powering appliances around the world, using the earth’s resonance to amplify energy created from renewable sources like waterfalls:
Export of power would then become the chief source of income for many happily situated countries. . . . Men could settle down anywhere, fertilize and irrigate the soil with little effort, and convert barren deserts into gardens, and thus the entire globe could be transformed and made a fitter abode for mankind.
Despite the metaphysics, or, indeed, because of them, this article and its photographs galvanized public opinion. A year after its publication, Tesla would begin to build the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island, thanks to funding from J. P. Morgan. Here he carried out experiments related to wireless power and theorized about building a mysterious “teleforce” energy weapon. For scientific, financial, and personal reasons, he never realized his vision of large-scale wireless power, but, as evidenced by — among countless other examples — the automotive company that bears his name, inventors continue to try and reply to the open letter that Tesla sent into the future.


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A Hall of Mirrors: Cabala, Spiegel Der Kunst Und Natur, In Alchymia (1615)
Text by Kevin Dann
Mar 15, 2022

Featuring four alchemical engravings by Raphael Custos — much reproduced since Carl Jung included the third as “The Mountain of the Adepts” in Psychology and Alchemy (1968) — Cabala’s leading symbol is the looking glass, which the author offers as a tool for penetrating the mysteries of alchemy and divinity. The century spanning from 1550 to 1650 saw the publication of hundreds of books with “Speculum”, “Spiegel”, and “Mirror” in their titles, a testament to the technology’s immense power over the European imagination. As Urszula Szulakowska describes, a belief emerged during this period that “pictures drawn according to the single-point perspective system could become a type of magical mirror”. To help its readers commune with God, the “celestial looking glass”, Cabala offers three graphical “mirrors” in the form of perspectival images rich with hermetic symbolism — a “Beginning” of “sapphire”, a “Middle” of “pure steel”, and an “End”, “sprung out of these two [preceding images] perfectly”. Prefacing this sequence, we find an engraving divided into three panels, titled “Mirror of Art and Nature”, offering a glimpse of the alchemical journey that is to follow.
“Beginning: Exaltation” bears the armorial cabala in the general sense of a path of wisdom, not any reference to the explicitly Jewish mystical technique. A fire-breathing chimera is encircled by a Latin alchemical A-to-Z and zodiacal foursomes. Framed by the Paracelsian tria prima of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury, a Raven, Peacock, and Phoenix rise toward the Sun — the Philosopher’s Stone of union with the Divine.
Arranged to correspond with their zodiacal rulerships, the personifications of the six other planets in “Middle: Conjunction” ascend toward Mercury, the goal of both the blindfolded gentleman and the fellow chasing the hare.
Topped by this same caduceus-bearing Mercury, Cabala’s final scene, “End: Multiplication”, depicts the resurrected Christ offering the Water of Life to King/Sun and Queen/Moon, while Peg-leg Saturn and his fellow planets wave their bellows from below, and the halo-bearing dove of the Holy Spirit flies between the walled city of Jerusalem (right), the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew JHVH, upper left), and Christ, the Fountain of Life.
Published the next year in Latin as Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia (1616), this translated edition contains a dedication to the Rosicrucians, absent from the German text, explicitly unveiling an inspiration behind the work. Cabala came into the world in the wake of Fama fraternitatis, a Rosicrucian manifesto whose appearance in 1614 led to hundreds of tracts either lauding or condemning its anonymous author’s call for the universal reformation of mankind. Following Cabala’s “Declaration of the most ancient stone instead of an Epilogue”, a succinct and comprehensive Paracelsian discourse is offered by the “Anonymous philosopher dedicated to the fraternity”, i.e., the brotherhood of Rosicrucians. Signed “paVLVS” in the cryptic manner characteristic of the brethren named in Rosicrucian tracts, the Roman numerals seem a simple — yet indecipherable — puzzle. The alchemical Discursus brevior that closes Cabala appears in only one other place: a 1615 Magdeburg text that gathers the Fama and Confessio with a suite of other writings, making it the largest of all the Rosicrucian manifestos. The anonymous creator of Cabala seems to have folded this discursus into his work, for they are exactly the same.
Cabala is often attributed to the Augsburg publisher Stephan Michelspacher. Yet the only part of Cabala’s text explicitly claimed by Michelspacher is a fawning prefatory apology to Ulm doctor Johannes Remmelin for having pirated his anatomical flapbook Catoptrum Microcosmicum (1613). Cabala’s actual author remains as elusive as “Father C.R.C.” (Christian Rosenkreutz), the legendary founder of Rosicrucianism. A possible candidate for the conception and execution of Cabala is Augsburg Paracelsian physician, collector and copyist Karl Widemann, who was, through his close association with Rosicrucian champion Adam Haslmayr, deeply imbedded in the still uncircumscribed constellation of individuals who brought both the Fama fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) into public circulation. Widely recognized as the most indefatigable collector and interpreter of Paracelsus’ original writings, there was no other person in Europe who had access to as rich a trove of Paracelsian work, and, through his friendship with Haslmayr, unfettered access also to the highly charged original writings of the Rosicrucians. Perhaps there remains some undetected speculum that will one day bring him or another mercurial brother of the Rosy Cross to light as Cabala’s true author.


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A Renaissance Riddle: The Sola Busca Tarot Deck (1491)
Text by Kevin Dann
Feb 3, 2022

The Latin motto TRAHOR FATIS (I am drawn by Fate) appears but four times in the Tarot masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, the Sola Busca deck, and yet it hangs unmistakably over the cards’ entire colorful procession of ancient Greek and Roman heroes. Armored in the style of late-fifteenth century northern Italy, they bear bagpipes, shields, lyres, pennants, staffs, and torches, while accompanied by basilisks, crows, falcons, doves, and eagles. Every single card is a miniature drama — the expressions of the highly individualized figures inviting us to speculate, like the Tarot itself, on the past and future of this cryptic world.
When the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage in Milan purchased the Sola Busca tarot deck in 2009, it had existed for five hundred years, and yet had barely ever been seen — a very strange thing for a deck of playing cards. Before a spate of studies appeared in Italian after 1990, it had only been written about three times: by Count Leopold Cicognara in Memoirs to Serve the History of Intaglio Printing (1831); by William Hughes Willshire in A Description of Playing and Other Cards (1876); and in 1935, when British Museum art historian Arthur Mayger Hind’s Early Italian Engravings advanced the first hypothesis about the origin of the deck and its author. Although still hotly debated, the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the Sola Busca deck — now housed at the Pinacoteca de Brera — was engraved in 1491, most likely in Ferrara, and was colored by hand about a decade later, in Venice. (Other versions of this deck exist in fragmented, unpainted form, preserved by the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum, and elsewhere.)
Considered the oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot deck in existence, the Sola Busca — named for the family of Milanese nobles who owned it for some five generations — was the first to be produced using copperplate engraving. It is also the earliest known tarot deck that illustrates the Major and Minor Trumps in the way that has become the standard, with characters and objects depicting allegorical scenes. In the Renaissance era this would have been revolutionary, while, today, some of these cards may seem familiar. In 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman–Smith to illustrate his The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), she drew inspiration — and for nearly a dozen cards, the exact imagery — from the Sola Busca deck, black-and-white photographs of which were exhibited at the British Museum in 1908.
The genius of the Tarot is its multivocality, its ability to convey manifold meanings independent of the interrogator. Shorn from the historical, mythological, and pictorial associations that would have been available to its users in fifteenth-century Venice or Ferrara, the Sola Busca deck is limited in its use for divinatory purposes today, and yet, since its enigmatic imagery irresistibly invites decoding, the deck nonetheless beckons twenty-first century cartomancers into a game of high imagination. Online Tarot forums host the most ingeniously freewheeling speculation about the Sola Busca’s sources and meanings, while the scholarly interpretations continue to be tentative and provisional, offering space for amateurs to make their own discoveries. In talismanic publisher Scarlet Imprint’s The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi (2017), Peter Mark Adams proposes a baroque hypothesis that the Sola Busca deck was a dark grimoire to aid the black magical operations of a secret Venetian elite cabal.
Some believe that Nicola di Maestro Antonio d'Ancona, “one of the most eccentric painters of the Renaissance”, may have been the artist behind the Sola Busca deck, although “the arguments are not entirely convincing”. Beyond the mystery of their creator lie the many puzzles embedded in these cards. Why does Alexander the Great (King of Swords) figure so largely in this deck? Is the “M.S.” on the Aces referring to Marin Sanudo, consigliere to the aristocratic Ferrrara D’Este family? Is Catone (XIII) a reference to Cato the Younger, who conquered Cyprus in 58 BCE, and thus an allusion to Venice’s annexation of Cyprus in 1489, two years before the deck’s creation? Whenever the TRAHOR FATIS inscription appears, it is accompanied by a seven–pointed “bearded” star (pogonius), raining influence toward Earth and its denizens. Is this the malefic Caput Algol in the head of the Medusa? Or the Great Comet of 1472? The fatis of the Tarot, and particularly of this magnificent work of Renaissance art, truly remains “in the stars”, pulling us fatefully toward its endless riddles.
Below you can browse the complete Trump suit as well as selections from the Cups, Coins, Wands, and Swords.


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Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion (1889)
Text by Kevin Dann and Hunter Dukes
Mar 9, 2022

Innovations in transportation are “the most powerful factor in the evolution of man”, wrote the inventor and industrialist Robert Pittis Scott in the introduction to his treatise on bicycles, tricycles, and man-motor carriages. He proceeds to quote a “great”, though unnamed, “genius”, who suspects that a day will come when human limbs will “shrivel and drop off”, “being entirely dispensed with in the art of moving and manipulating matter”. And yet, in 1889, cycling heavily taxed the limbs rather than relaxing them to the point of atrophy. This was about to change for the better thanks to the recent development of the first practical inflatable tire by John Boyd Dunlop. While Scott thought the technology “one of the grandest ideas in the way of anti-vibration”, he also aired some doubts over its predilection for “cutting and collapsing” and seemed more enthused by the possibility of a flexible rim which simply buckled its way over obstacles.
Scott peered into the future, and narrowly missed laying claim to it, with his predictions about the Safety bicycle, which sported a rear-mounted chain drive, ball-bearing hubs, a steel frame, and equal size wheels — many of the features now common across cruisers and ten-speeds. Though the initial hundred pages of his book take the high-wheeled Ordinary or “penny-farthing” as standard, Scott was one of the first Americans to sense the potential of a rear-driven design. A millionaire manufacturer of iron fruit-paring devices, Scott had made the overseas journey to Coventry, the world’s leading bicycle-manufacturing city, to commission a custom two-wheeler, which — he would discover with frustration — almost exactly matched the specifications of England's newly unveiled Starley Rover, the first mass-produced Safety bicycle.
At a time when British and American physicians published dire warnings about bicycles causing hernias, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and “urethral stricture”, Scott reassured his readers that they merely needed to choose the right saddle and suspension springs to keep their spine and pelvic anatomy intact. He championed women’s adoption of the new sport, arguing that “less seraphic and more muscular tissue tends to make us all happier”. As springy as a Brooks saddle on Dunlop tires, Scott’s prose is delightful even when taking up the biomechanics of machine and rider, but it reaches empyrean heights in the book’s second half, which is prefaced by a hysterical self-deprecating account of his own patent application tribulations. Scott arrives on an honest algorithm for hobbyists who misunderstand the mathematics of invention:
Scale of proportional genius required for each department in benefiting mankind (and yourself) by means of invention: 2%, inventing; 7%, getting into shape; 3%, getting American patent; .01%, getting English patent; 10% getting patent through court; 28%, getting the money; 49.99%, keeping it after you get it.
Part II’s whimsical and illustrated tour through the previous century of “man-motor locomotion” pairs technical drawings and brief texts from patent applications with satiric running heads and humorous single sentence reviews of a wild peloton of wheeled contraptions, including: “A Machine-Shop on Wheels”, “Rig-a-Jig-Jig and Away We Go”, “The Power Never Ceases”, “My Kingdom for a Horse”, and “Said Not to Tumble Over”. The book concludes with Colorado machinist Reuben Jasper Spalding’s Da Vinci-esque “Improved Flying-Machine” (Patent #396,984) — christened “The Coming Man” by the author. Scott too spent years experimenting with airships, before training his eye on pneumatic tires. . . for automobiles.

author: Kevin Dann and Hunter Dukes


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Bruegel the Elder’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Mar 1, 2022

Pieter Bruegel’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish depicts a surreal, cannibalistic feeding frenzy on the waterfront: an unfortunate turn of events for a father-son fishing trip. A fearsomely large fish has been heaved upon the beach. From its gaping mouth, as well as a gash being carved in its midsection, spill forth two torrents of seemingly ravenous marine life. On land and at sea, sizable fish flounder after their inferiors, while eels chase eels, and some become meals for an assortment of predatory mollusks. The Flemish description below this scene, which appears in Pieter van der Heyden’s 1557 engraving, puts a colloquial spin on a popular proverb: “Look son, I have long known that the big fish eat the small.” And aboard their shared boat, the boy gestures to the madness in tandem with his father, their arms perfectly framing the isolated word of Latin: ecce. Behold.
Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569) produced the model for Big Fish Eat Little Fish in 1556, creating an intricately textured illustration via gray and black ink atop paper. At the same time, the business of printmaking was beginning to hit its stride throughout Europe, and became particularly popular in Bruegel’s adopted home of Antwerp. This movement towards increased print production was led in large part by Bruegel’s long-time publisher, Hieronymus Cock, whose influence likely led the Netherlandish artist to develop an interest in engravings. Bruegel’s drawn version of Big Fish Eat Little Fish is thought to have been created with the intent to guide an engraver’s hand — evidenced by the immaculate attention to depth. The water is carefully striated; the creature’s back stippled to form a soft gradation.
Bruegel's illustration was ultimately engraved in copper by Van der Heyden, who followed the drawing with technical prowess. Van der Heyden’s monogram can be found in the lower left-hand corner, across from the publisher mark, “Cock. EXCV. 1557”. And just above the father’s dormant oar, as though left to ornament the sand, are the words: “Hieronymus Bosch inventor”. Oddly, Bosch passed away in 1516, meaning that Cock most likely used his name for its widespread marketability, or as an homage to his obvious influence on Bruegel. The human-size fish who has suddenly sprung legs and two slippered feet, plodding away with a smaller fish in his mouth, is a clear echo of Bosch’s artistry.
The works of Bruegel often feature scenes of peasant lives, poised to represent various ancient proverbs. In his depiction of chaotic consumption through Big Fish Eat Little Fish, the lesson of large fish devouring their miniatures might relate to a general sense of injustice, the feeling that predation is innately born and instinctive. The wealthy exploit the impoverished; the powerful pummel the weak. This saying may owe its popularity to Erasmus’ Adagia, a compilation of Greek and Latin proverbs assembled in the early sixteenth-century, which includes: “Serpens ni edat serpentem, draco non fiet” (A serpent, unless it devours a serpent, will not become a dragon). Yet while Erasmus may have played a role in cementing the proverb within a popular canon, the observation of same-species predation can be traced all the way back to Aristotle’s History of the Animals. Here, Aristotle notes that, “As a general rule the larger fishes catch the smaller ones in their mouths”, and “all fishes devour their own species, with the single exception of the cestreus or mullet”. This history includes myriad descriptions of marine diets, including the hierarchy of eels and crawfish, and the carnivorous tendencies of certain mollusks, like the giant clam clamped down on a fish’s back in Bruegel’s image.
Given that Cock’s publishing company, Aux Quatre Vents, was primarily directed towards a well-educated crowd, the proverb within Big Fish Eat Little Fish would have been easily recognized and understood. In spite of this, the engraving became a source for various adaptations over time. A later version was printed by Ioan Galle in the mid-1600s, and saw the addition of several explanatory texts. Above the image sits the trilingual phrase: “The oppression of the poor. The rich suppress you with their power. Letter of James, 2:6”. Perhaps the most explicitly political adaptation, however, was released by an anonymous engraver ca. 1619, transforming the proverb into targeted critique. The artist has clearly labeled each facet of the image, most significantly tagging the enormous fish as “Barnevelsche Monster”, a reference to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, a controversial former Chancellor of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. His body is being swiftly executed by the labeled “knife of righteousness”, a weapon wielded by Maurice of Orange, Oldenbarnevelt’s eventual political enemy. Here, the attacker’s head is tilted upwards to reveal his face, in contrast to the original engravings that left him hidden behind his hat. Each of the fish spilling out of Oldenbarnevelt’s wounded body are named as leading men of the Dutch States Party, a republican political faction which stood for provincial sovereignty. An aquatic-avian hybrid remains in flight above the satirical tableau, but now boasts two small horns. And the child’s once awe-stricken ecce is suddenly imbued with undeniable socio-political significance. What does it mean to sit back and simply “behold”?

author: Paloma Ruiz


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Jan Luyken’s Frontispiece for Osteologia (1680)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 3, 2022

“To bear a name is both terrible and necessary”, laments one of Don DeLillo’s characters, addressing the double-bind of linguistic existence. Novelists, poets, and philosophers have long been drawn to Adam when thinking about the generative magic of language and its potential devastation. In Genesis, God sculpts the beasts of the field from earthen elements, marching them before the first man, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”. For centuries, this scene has been imagined by artists as a stately procession — the recently formed fauna patiently awaiting their designation. Yet just as God conjured these creatures out of a timeless void, terminating their eternal sleep, so too Adam’s actions are at once creative and destructive: he births animals into language, while, in Hegel’s words, “nullifying them as beings of their own account”. Parroting the German philosopher, Maurice Blanchot describes how: “God had created all living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared”.
This frontispiece etching, printed by Jan Luyken for Cornelis van Dyk’s Osteologia (1680), seems to speak to the consequences of Adam’s naming as imagined by Hegel and Blanchot. The animals are bare-bones, stripped of life’s flesh, and summoned toward a skeletal figure — Adam? Noah? St Peter? Van Dyk? — who reads off his list. In the foreground, a ledgered turtle, hedgehog, rabbit, dog, horse, and camel march toward their exit stage right. Where are they headed? Is there some paradise beyond, where their tissue will be restored? Where these creatures will no longer carry the burden of humanity’s taxonomical projects, like the fowls who labor to bear the banner text in the image’s leafless trees? Unlikely, even though the list’s alphabetic letters decay into an asemic scribble, as if language begins to falter in the face of a seemingly infinite parade of animal life. Rather, viewed in retrospect, this image appears to foretell the ceaseless march of scientific progress, and the Enlightenment’s mission to give order to the natural world. A vanguard of this mission, Van Dyk’s seventeenth-century study of bones begins with a discussion of Genesis. The natural scientist speculates if Adam was a “hermaphrodite”, due to his apparently parthenogenetic powers — making Eve from his own body, who he also names — before proceeding to dissect the pictured animals in search of their osteo-logical innards.


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William Baillie-Grohman’s Sport in Art (1913)

Oct 27, 2021

“Sport in Art” commences with the fifteenth century, just previous to the invention of printing, and ends with the French Revolution, thus taking in the four centuries that are as vital to the history of venery as they are to that of art.
So explains William Baillie-Grohman (1851–1921) in the preface to his 1913 book Sport in Art: An Iconography of Sport, which includes a grand total of 243 illustrations — two in colour, the rest in black-and-white. A warning for tender-hearted readers: here “sport” means the pursuit and killing of animals, though this encyclopedic tome enfolds other topics too. You will learn, for instance, what jolly song was sung while the seventeenth-century Duke of Coburg used his “waidblatt” (game knife) to spank the buttocks of an etiquette-lacking huntsman, laid across the corpse of a stag: “Jo, Jo, ha, ho ! this is for the King, princes and lords!”
The English-Austrian author was raised in Tyrol, where he honed his hunting and mountaineering abilities before moving abroad. Baillie-Grohman found a welcome new landscape in the Rockies of North America and settled in British Columbia during the 1880s, where he invested in canal and land development. While the author produced various articles and books on hunting practices in both of these stomping grounds, Sport in Art remains his tour de force.
As evidenced by some of the earliest human cave paintings, art and hunting have long entwined. Baillie-Grohman claims that, “as hunting was made the subject of the earliest pictorial designs, hunters can rightly claim to have given the first impulse to art”. The author himself certainly combines intimate knowledge of the two spheres. The illustrations presented range from Gaston de Foix’s La livre de chasse, ca. 1440; through Edward of Norwich’s mid-fifteenth century The Master of Game; to Horace Bénédict de Saussure’s Alpine hunts during his ascent of Mont Blanc, illustrated in 1790. Along the way, Baillie-Grohman presents works by Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Le Moyne, and a flock of lesser-known others.
Baillie-Grohman does not limit himself to straight-forward representations. He understands that hunting is at once an allegorical and visceral pursuit (see Hendrik Goltzius’ The Hunt after Wealth below). He also includes material pertaining to the wider world of hunting: an emblem showing the brands on hounds; a certificate of indenture for a hunt apprentice; a page from Emperor Charles VI’s diary, detailing a day’s take in 1732; and an extraordinary engraved brass hunting calendar, for keeping track of the bag.
The great range of images is intercut with knowledgeable discussion of the activities at hand. Not that the author always approves: fox-tossing is described as “A still worse instance of decadent sport”. Indeed, many might see this sentiment aptly applied to much of the hunting pursuits covered which, alongside more familiar prey, include the killing of otters, wolves, bears, and bison. Still, despite the bloodlust and destruction of life that sits at its core, the book remains a fascinating reminder of the importance and popularity that hunting has held, not only in the workings of society at large but in the confines of the artist’s studio too.


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Lithographs from M. E. Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons (1827)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 12, 2021

With the last sights of summer having now vanished for many in Europe and North America, you may find, among fallen leaves and soggy mulch, mushrooms erupting overnight. We present here lithographs by A. Cornillon from Michel Étienne Descourtilz’s Atlas des champignons: comestibles, suspects et vénéneux (Atlas of mushrooms: edible, suspect and poisonous). There are the somewhat tasteless specimens familiar from supermarket shelves, as well as rarer varietes: the chanterelles, displayed at giant scale, look particularly tempting, while a lovely orange lion’s mane appears like a bearded god with his hat pulled low. The “suspect” mushrooms feature common lookalikes. Fly agaric, for example, can resemble edible species of blushers (in the Agaricomycetes class). The latter mushrooms do well in a cream sauce; consumption of the former results in an unpredictable cocktail of symptoms — hallucinations, euphoria, and nausea, if lucky, seizures and coma, if not. The toxic toadstools speak for themselves and highlight the danger of mushroom hunting without adequate knowledge: 2020 saw hundreds poisoned in France due to misidentification.
On the topic of danger, Descourtilz himself led a curious life, working as a physician, botanist, and inadvertent historiographer of the Haitian Revolution. His 1809 Voyages d’un naturaliste chronicles, among other adventures, a trip from France to Haiti in 1799 in order to secure his family’s plantations. Despite having been issued a passport, he was arrested soon after his arrival by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, under Toussaint Louverture’s command, and only escaped death due to his medical training and the intervention of Mme Dessalines, the later Empress of Haiti: Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur. He spent four years in Haiti, serving against his will as a physician to the revolutionary forces. While he “was mindful to behave in a manner appropriate to the new economic and racial order”, writes Philippe R. Girard, Descoutilz remained highly critical of independence and in support of reconquest. For subsequent historians, Descourtilz’s observation of Toussaint offers a glimpse of the revolutionary leader’s writing practices and complex use of secretaries. But Descourtilz maintains a somewhat abrasive tone throughout his travelogue. “Profoundly self-centered”, writes Jeremy D. Popkin, “Descourtilz judged those he encountered largely in terms of how they treated him personally”. He returned to France with his worldview largely unchanged — eager to practice medicine and seek out mushrooms.


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Adolf Schmidt’s Atlas der Diatomaceenkunde (1890)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 29, 2021

“Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass”, write the editors of the North American diatom society. Unicellular organisms that sometimes form colonies, these plankton have a siliceous skeleton known as a frustule, and thrive everywhere, in any type of water: saline, brackish, or fresh. The scale of diatoms varies widely, as does their geometry. Some are about three micrometers in diameter, others are almost visible to the unassisted eye. Some are circular with spines resembling “Martian antennae”, writes Mary Ann Tiffany and Stephen S. Nagy in a book chapter about “The Beauty of Diatoms”, others sport “a fringe-like skirt”. Accordingly, researchers seem to always have a favorite specimen, from an aesthetic point of view, and nineteenth-century enthusiasts went so far as to arrange ornamental slides of diatoms, a practice still in existence today. For the German natural scientist and clergyman Adolf Schmidt (1812–1899), who edited the catalogue in which the images below first appeared, the most beautiful diatom was Melosira, which looks like a caterpillar, composed of filamentous cells.
While diatoms helped create the conditions for animal life, and continue to account for twenty percent of the photosynthesis that occurs on earth, they were not observed by humans until relatively recently. Scholars think the first reference to diatoms comes from a 1703 contribution to Philosophical Transactions by an unknown Englishman. Using a crude microscope to examine the roots of duckweeds, the man “saw adhering to them (and sometimes separate in the water) many pretty branches, compos’d of rectangular oblongs and exact squares”. In accordance with the principle of “multiple discovery” or “simultaneous invention”, it seems that the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek may have observed diatoms on Christmas day, the previous year, while gazing at the same kind of roots — though he believed the shapes to be animalcules, a term previously coined for the microorganisms he had glimpsed in rainwater.
Almost immediately these tiny algae started causing trouble. According to prevailing theories of eighteenth-century biological classification, plants were not supposed to move, suggesting that diatoms were indeed minuscule animals. (We now know that diatoms are non-motile, capable only of “limited movement along a substrate by secretion of mucilaginous material along a slit-like groove or channel called a raphe”.) Advances in microscopy during the nineteenth century allowed for better observation and classification of diatoms the world over, leading to illustrations by Astrid Cleve-Euler, P. T. Cleve, Christian Gottfied Ehrenberg, Albert Grunow, Henri Ferdinand Van Heurck, and Adolph Schmidt.
The first instalment of Schmidt’s Atlas appeared in 1874, in collaboration with Gründler, Grunow, Janesch, Weissflog, and Witt, and was frequently updated with contributions by other colleagues thereafter, until the final edition in 1959. While these illustrations from the catalogue are not as aestheticized as Ernst Haeckel’s depiction of diatoms in Kunstformen der Natur (1904), and lack the color of more modern diatom images, their contribution to the history of science cannot be overstated. Deeming the Atlas “world-famous” and “gigantic”, a group of scientists researching the nanotechnological possibilities of diatoms believe that Schmidt “should be given the honour due to him” by calling the researcher by his clerical title: “‘the Archidiaconus [archdeacon] Schmidt’ — certainly the most impressive title a diatomist could have”.
Featured below are images from an 1890 edition of Schmidt's Atlas, a compilation missing plates 1 to 80 but printed in a most striking blue. We are not quite sure how its pages have ended up with such a hue — perhaps the result of a type of early photocopying? While the diatoms seem at ease in this aqueous pallet, you can also view more traditional printings of the plates here.


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Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 9, 2021

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a fictional linguist describes a phonetic endemic: missed employment opportunities due to the connotations of a person’s accent. Addressing the “many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue”, the professor insists that “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first”. Shaw’s wit shows through in the near homonym: aspirations of social mobility, in this period, often included pronunciationary emulation — the breathy aitch sounds of aspirated consonants.
Alfred Leach, who Steven Connor, in Beyond Words, calls one of the “doughiest defenders of the h”, believed that English’s aspirated aitch (or rather, haitch) signaled a direct inheritance from Classical antiquity. In the pronounced h of words like “herb” — notably lacking from American English — he heard the “spiritus asper” of Hellenism. Leach was writing in a period when linguists began reflecting on the shifting history of aspirates and the role they played in indicating status, class, and education. These traits continue into our present day. The historian of language Henry Hitchings, whose own name is uncannily reminiscent of Shaw’s Henry Higgins, argues that the pronunciation of this letter is “still a significant shibboleth”, and quotes Leach’s contemporary, Oxford scholar Henry Sweet, who called it “an almost infallible test of education and refinement”.
Why so much huffing about the letter H? Throughout the nineteenth century, this aspirated sound was on the rise. At the end of the previous century, Received Pronunciation (RP) became known as the accent of aristocracy, leading to aspirational elocution guides like Poor Letter H (1854). While words like “hotel” had once been pronounced in the French style (oh-tell), English speakers had begun to exhale audibly, as if yawning at the continued Norman influence on British tongues. Leach led the charge against “English Grammarians” who “conspired to withhold from us the means of propitiating this demon Aspirate”. In The Letter H, he ridicules those he calls “H-droppers”, speakers whose phonetic errors seem to snowball: “lost H’s have a knack of turning up in wrong places, when they return at all”. Leach is prone to hyperbole — “the early aspirative labours of a converted H-dropper give birth to monstrosities” — and sneers at Cockney speech: “Horkney hoysters, ‘amshire ‘am, and ‘am and heggs”.
To tell his story correctly, the linguist lapses orthographic, going back to the H’s origin in Egyptian and Phoenician characters. Working his way up to the present, Leach proclaims that “the modern English H is an important embellishment, and adds immensely to the strength and pleasing effect of speech”. At times, in this book, the H seems semi-animate. It’s “an earnest letter” and brings excitement into the language: “Ho! Ha! Hollo! Hurrah! Hang it!”. Leach ends his surprisingly captivating linguistic treatise by waxing maudlin. “Any letter doomed to die out of a word or a language, generally attempts to depart gracefully by first acquiring the nature of an aspirate-consonant, and then turns into a perfect H; under this form it relies upon h-dropping mortals to give it quiet burial, and unobtrusively confide it to Oblivion.” Markedly grumpy, Leach may have found himself hopeful had he heard the aspirated h humming along in our language today.


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Zanzibar Tales (1901)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 22, 2021

Folktales from the Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania bear traces of the centuries during which the islands served as a center for trade in the Indian ocean, the complex history of intracontinental cultural exchange on the East African coast, and the influence of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit stories on Swahili narratives. As such, it is difficult to reconstruct the history of these tales. (An 1894 German translation of similar stories wondered if they “were told already in Noah’s ark”.) Presented here are ten stories adapted by George W. Bateman, which some claim inspired Disney’s Bambi and The Lion King, although we have been unable to find the resemblance.
On the subject of animals, many of the stories feature creatures playing archetypal roles. “The Hare and the Lion”, for instance, sits somewhere between the story as it is told in the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra and its Persian adaptations, Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and hare, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Grimms’ Little Red Cap. In this folktale, Soongoora, the hare, finds a calabash tree full of honeybees and recruits the big rat named Bookoo with a lie. “My father has died, and has left me a hive of honey. I would like you to come and help me eat it.” After smoking out the hive, they begin to feast, but the lion who owns the honey, Simba, camps out at the tree’s base. The hare throws himself to the lion, disguised as a bundle of straw, leaving Simba a honey-stuffed rat for his supper. Three days later, Soongoora plays the same trick on Kobay, the cautious tortoise. The story ends with Simba hidden inside Soongoora’s warren, waiting to ambush him and his wife. But the wily hare, seeing paw marks, sprints away, and the lion, exhausted, returns to his tree, giving up any hope of revenge. (Simba gets off easy: in the next tale, after the lion gets his head stuck in a cave, a rabbit eats his rear then annexes his farm.) Aside from nonhuman protagonists, we also meet: a fatherless huntsman in training, who, after trapping animals, lets them go and is rewarded with silver and gold; a magician who trains the sultan’s children to be great scholars, keeps one for himself, and eventually gets boiled alive in a pot of stew; and the son of a great physician, who, to follow in his father’s lineage, must confront the king of snakes.
Not much is known about George W. Bateman, who translated these tales from Swahili. He was working in the intellectual shadow of the colonial bishop Edward Steere, author of Swahili Tales, As Told by Natives of Zanzibar (1870). Unlike Steere — who once wrote that the “streets [of Zanzibar] are empty of prostitutes because the homes are full of them and there is no scandal because there is no shame” — Bateman assumes neither a tone of imperial dehumanization nor falls prey to what Jeremy Prestholdt describes as a strain of “British humanitarian discourse” whereby the Zanzibari become “blank slates onto which the interests of others could be written”. Bateman opens his preface not in the register of idylls or myth, but with a description of Unguja circa 1871, before the late-nineteenth century New Imperialism, when the “Scramble for Africa” accelerated. The island, writes Bateman, “was the starting place of all expeditions into the interior”, with caravans loaded with beads and cloth to be traded inland for “elephants’ tusks and slaves — for Unguja boasted the only, and the last, open slave-market in the world then”.
Much has changed, yet Bateman sounds like he could be commenting on twenty-first century trophy-hunting tourism when discussing parties of “rich white men going to hunt ‘big game’”. Bateman’s interest in conservation is both biological and linguistic. Yet, like the folktales selected here, he is perhaps more concerned with the animals than the people of Zanzibar. “If you have read any accounts of adventure in Africa, you will know that travelers never mention animals of any kind that are gifted with the faculty of speech. . . No, indeed; only the native-born know of these. . . it will not be long before such wonderful specimens of zoology will be as extinct as the ichthyosaurus, dinornis, and other poor creatures who never dreamed of the awful names that would be applied to them”.


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A Monster in the Heart: Edward May’s A Most Certaine and True Relation (1639)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 5, 2021

When John Pennant passed on October 6, 1637, at the age of twenty-one, the young man’s family began investigating. His aunt and uncle, Sir Francis and Lady Herris, called for a surgeon to perform an autopsy, accompanied by physician Edward May, who relates the following tale. Pennant’s organs were in a mixed state: his bladder “full of purulent and ulcerous matter”; one kidney was “consumed”, the other “as big as any two kidnies”; the lungs were reasonably good; and, while part of his liver had an irregular growth, that could be chalked up to “his writing profession”. It was the heart that seemed most impacted — Pennant’s left ventricle was “as hard as a stone” and had gathered “all the blood that was in his body left”. But May and the surgeon discovered more than blood. Cutting further into the organ, they perceived “a carnouse [fleshy] substance. . . wreathed together in foldes like a worme or Serpent”, which the doctors subdued with a circle of garlic, just in case it remained alive.
How did a serpent get into Pennant’s heart? May is not sure, but begins assembling evidence. It may have lived there for three years, when the youth stopped buttoning his “Doublet in the Morning, but [chose to] be open breasted in all weathers”. The doctor then turns to medical literature, referencing a case in John Stow’s 1586 chronicle, which seems to describe equine heartworm. While we now know that humans are rarer hosts for Dirofilaria than horses or dogs, Stowe made a deduction that the parasite might be present in our hearts as well. May has no problem acknowledging that wormy creatures can thrive within the body — for he casually recounts how people have been known to “vomit Yeeles [eels] and Serpents of strange forms” — but believes they usually live in the stomach and rarely pass to the heart.
This “most certaine and true relation”, like other early-modern medical treatises, relates empirical observation to classical knowledge, moving, in a matter of pages, from a history of the individual’s illness to “How Hippocrates and the Ancients are to be understood”. More curious, it seems the parasite transmitted some of its higher qualities to the host. Before his death, John Pennant “had an excellent Eye”, “extraordinarily sharpe”, “like the Eye of a Serpent”, which leads May to an affirmation of what is known as the doctrine of signatures, a belief that proximity engenders resemblance: “secret, unusuall and strange inward diseases, doe send forth some radios, or signatures from the center”. He hopes that these signatures might be recognized by other physicians before serpents kill their patients too. As for this particular monster, it was sewn back into Pennant’s corpse, honoring Dorothy Pennant’s wishes for her son: “As it came with him, so it shall goe with him”.
Centuries later, the creature still puzzles medical researchers. Thankfully, it seems that it was not a worm, serpent, or extraterrestrial alien eel. Writing in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (1977), D.A. Denham recounts wondering if the “monster” was in fact the first reference to Dirofilaria immitis in humans, but says he was “quickly disabused” of the notion. Certain that it is not a parasitic worm, Denham thinks the most likely explanation for the “monster” is merely a misidentified blood plasma clot, formed after death, and in no way related to Pennant’s illness. Writing in a 2001 issue of The Lancet, Ruth Richardson agrees with Denham, and exonerates Dorothy Pennant, whom May had called “babish” for destroying medical evidence, finding an enduring “disjunction between public and professional notions of what appropriately belongs to the dead”. Perhaps this is a mystery best left undisturbed.


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A Modest Apology for the Man in the Bottle (1749)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 27, 2021

A message in a bottle? Sure. A five-masted model ship, running downwind, enclosed within a flask? Difficult, but it can be done. What about a lithe harlequin, squeezing himself into a jug? That must be an impossible feat . . . right? Scheduled to appear at London’s Haymarket Theatre in January 1749, the Bottle Conjuror promised exactly this: not so much an act of conjuring, but a feat of human condensation.
The Bottle Conjurer was less of an illusionist’s event, the event more an illusion in itself. John Timbs sets the scene in Romance of London (1865), his remarkable three-volume collection of “strange stories” about poisoners, corpse burglars, the cudgeling of John Dryden, and, of course, The Bottle Conjuror. According to Timbs, this ruse arose from bored nobility, the Duke of Montagu and Earl of Chesterfield, debating the gullibility of fools. “‘Surely’, said Lord Chesterfield, ‘if a man should say that he would jump into a quart bottle, nobody would believe that!’” The Duke disagreed and so they put out a public notice, advertising that the performance was to be held where a person would “get into a tavern quart bottle, without equivocation, and while there sing several songs, and suffer any spectator to handle the bottle”. As if this was not intriguing enough, they claimed that the conjuror could play the sound of every instrument in the world through a simple walking cane, and raise the dead, for the purposes of polite conversation.
Tickets were bought, hats and coats were checked at the door, and the Haymarket brimmed with an anticipatory audience. They sat for roughly an hour, according to Barbara M. Benedict, staring at an empty vessel on an unadorned table. Momentarily diffusing the collective tension, an audience member shouted that he would squeeze himself into a beer mug if paid double the price of admission. Guffaws resounded, but this jubilation quickly spiraled into rage when the house proprietor finally revealed that the evening’s promised entertainment had vanished into thin air (along with the audience’s possessions from the cloakroom, claims Benedict).
One thing is certain: the crowd rioted, tearing up benches, destroying the sets and scenery, and dragging whatever possible out onto London’s streets, staging a bonfire, with the theater’s curtain hoisted as a kind of victory flag. The event was not without humor: tricked by his own social class, the Duke of Cumberland (son to the King) was particularly enraged and drew his saber, intending to charge the bottle, only to be quickly disarmed. Quoting a letter sent by “a Scotch Jacobite lady”, Timbs ribs the Duke: “Fools should not have chopping-sticks”.
Conspiracy theories proliferated. Some claimed that the Bottle Man had been ready to perform, but, as a warmup, decided to demonstrate the illusion in the theater’s green room to a potential patron. He soon found himself corked and kidnapped. William S. Walsh relates the story in his Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892):
Thus the poor man being bit himself, in being confined in the Bottle and in a Gentleman’s Pocket, could not be in another Place; for he never advertised he would go into two Bottles at one and the same time. He is still in the Gentleman’s custody, who uncorks him now and then to feed him; but his long confinement has so damped his Spirits that instead of singing and dancing he is perpetually crying and cursing his ill Fate.
Alongside the numerous parodies and satires that arose in the wake of this hoax, many of the “facts” remain historical conjecture. The Duke of Montagu and Earl of Chesterfield were not credited as authors of the prank until twenty-three years after the event. And other sources swap Montagu for the Duke of Portland. Stranger still, an associate of Montagu, Dudley Bradstreet — a famed government informant during the Jacobite uprising — claimed to have retired from tradecraft into bottle conjury, taking credit for the hoax and going so far as to pen a play about his exploits. (An extensive history in an 1831 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine outlines Bradstreet’s claim.) The bottle hoax reflected other satires. Notably, a series of etchings featuring “Don Jumpedo”, who one-ups the Bottle Conjuror by jumping down his own throat.
Featured above for your perusal is a mysterious pamphlet that appeared in the same year as the Haymarket Theatre debacle: A Modest Apology for the Man in the Bottle. Its author, who signs the pamphlet as “The Bottleman”, blames the event on his loss of work to an immigrant labor force, claiming that he staged the “Stratagem” for profit, as a desperate attempt “to keep the Wolf from the Door”. He longs for a patron of the arts, but has little artistic talent. Were he an “Italian Singer”, fiddler, or dancer, there would have been no need for the bottle. And, after much self pity, The Bottleman rebuts critics who have compared him to the “Son of Satan or Satan himself”, describing the failings of government, taxation, and foreign relations as much worse evils. The most plausible explanation offered is that it was, simply, the wrong bottle: “my Intent was to please the Audience in a very, very large Bottle”. The writer explains that he had practiced the act for years, only to find himself sabotaged by a vase.
The apology, in other words, is anything but . . . and occasionally decays into raving speculations that take the form of Schrödinger-like thought experiments: “the only Question will arise is, Whether I was, or was not in the Bottle?”, to which the anonymous author asks us to consider a third option: “Whether I am not in the Bottle still. . .?” In a sense, the Haymarket hoax had a metaphysical quality akin to paradoxes like “the Kilkenny cats”, who consume each other whole, leaving only their tails behind. Promising vanishment, the very event vanished before its eager audiences’ eyes, leaving a history of dubious tales and half-truths in its void.


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Between Frogs and Gods: Illustrations of Physiognomy
Text by Paloma Ruiz and Hunter Dukes
Jan 6, 2022

For many of us, the image of a frog evokes feelings which fall anywhere between utter ambivalence and mild fondness. The common frog is neither fearsomely feral, nor an affectionate family pet. Children chase them, princesses kiss them, and backyard swimmers rescue them from drowning in pools. For Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), however, frogs are “the swollen representative of a disgusting bestiality”, and a manifestation of true “satanical hideousness and malignity”. In light of these epithets, one might wonder, what did the frog do to deserve such scathing description? In Lavater’s understanding, the frog’s fault resides in the angle of its forehead.
The etchings above, commissioned by Lavater from the Swiss printmaker Christian von Mechel (1737–1817), put the physiognomist’s ideas into color and motion. Across twenty-four frames, the profile of an unassuming amphibian slowly metamorphs into that of Apollo (considered the epitome of masculine beauty). At its core, Lavater’s physiognomy relies on the belief that a creature’s true character and morality can be discerned from their “lines of countenance”, often revealed by analyzing silhouettes. In many ways, he spent his career trying to offer scientific proof of the ancient Greek concept known as kalokagathia — that goodness manifests as beauty, evil as ugliness — the focus of his greatest-known work, the four-volume Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–1778).
The frog-to-Apollo images, and the text they illustrate (“Ueber die Animalitäts-Linien”), didn't feature in the original German edition of Lavater’s treatise, but plans were made to include it as a supplement to the much delayed French edition of the final volume. It seems Lavater had an idea for the amphibian sequence as early as 1777, the date given to a copperplate engraving (likely by Lavater himself) found in his collection, but it wasn't until the 1790s that things were readied for publication. Lavater commissioned etchings from Mechel in 1795 (seemingly based on this earlier copperplate engraving), but he was ultimately dissatisfied with Mechel's efforts (and price) and rejected them.
Lavater would die before the frog-to-Apollo text with accompanying images finally made it into print, first in an 1802 collection of unpublished writings, and then in the long awaited French fourth volume published the following year. In both of these versions we see simple line renditions — much closer to the 1777 engraving than Mechel's interpretation. The frog-to-Apollo motif also crops up in additional unattributed images, such as the series of twenty-four small-format watercolors by an anonymous draftsman held at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (dated to 1795, reproduced at the end of this post), and others that David Bindman found, during research for Ape to Apollo, in the Lavater's “Kunstkabinett” — a personal archive of more than 22,000 portraits.
While these images of the human emerging from the animal might, at first glance, seem to anticipate Darwinian theories of evolution, Lavater was, as Bindman comments, “a Protestant preacher fervently hostile to Enlightenment thinking and to anything that would suggest a continuum between the animal and the human”.  (Darwin, on the other hand, owned a well-read version of Lavater's writings.) For Lavater, the series of images leading from frog through “primitive man” to Grecian god, demonstrated rigid and unchanging taxonomic divisions between humans and animals, and also between some humans and other (in his view) lesser humans.
Like the ancients before him, Lavater believed that, after careful examination, the disposition of every human and animal would reveal itself through the proportions of the head. In his writings, the angle of the neck corresponds to sincerity; the chin to sensuality; and the lips to a mixture of anger, love, or hate. Small nostrils are notorious for denoting timidity, and the bridge of the nose speaks to tranquility versus brute strength. However, the most important appears to have been the angle of the forehead. Invoking the work of Pieter Camper, a Dutch anatomist dedicated to studying facial angles across species, Lavater explains how the twenty-five degree angle of the frog's head increases to a roughly seventy degree angle in the head of a man. Compounded with the belief that, “of all earthly creatures, man is the most perfect”, Lavater linked this vertical visage to intelligence and wit, as well as “the transition from brutal deformity to ideal beauty”. In a fascinating twist — or perhaps a Protestant cringe at classical polytheism — Lavater also notes that many Greek gods and heroes are depicted as having dramatically protruding foreheads, with angles of up to one-hundred degrees. This extreme physiognomy may be demonstrative of their divinity, but it is “not naturally beautiful, not truly human”.
While Lavater may have believed that “man is the most perfect”, he did not believe that all races were equal within that perfection. He writes that while the European forehead is “most beautiful”, averaging around eighty degrees, the average Chinese forehead is seventy-five, and an angle “below seventy degrees gives the countenance of the negro of Angola and the Calmuc; and by a further diminution soon loses all trace of resemblance to humanity”. In tying certain spiritual, intellectual, or moral capacity to the shapes of heads and faces — with the ideal echoing his own visage — Lavater's ideas are inseparable from the history of scientific racism and the emerging frameworks of racial categorization in the late eighteenth-century.  Backed by an anthropocentric belief that non-human species are foul and unintelligent, physiognomists such as Lavater weaponized the face to create a racial hierarchy, ranking non-Europeans much nearer to the realm of “satanical” animality. As the title of Richard T. Gray's 2004 study implies, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz, physiognomy set in motion a mode of profiling and differentiating human bodies that enabled some of the most horrific events in modern history.

author: Paloma Ruiz and Hunter Dukes