text:
A Remembrance of Aerial Forms: Odilon Redon’s À Edgar Poe (1882)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 11, 2021

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was many things: a painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and pastellist, who, over the course of his career, developed a singular style that fed both the decadent symbolism of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth. One of France’s most influential, yet (still) relatively unknown visionaries, he etched disembodied eyeballs and smudged ballooning minds in charcoal chiaroscuro, floating through a bardo between death and hell. His atmospheric melancholia bridged the Gothic with Surrealism, focusing on three types of landscape: nocturnal, autumnal, lunar. He had a naturalist’s talent for biological insight, but refracted through the medieval bestiary, and summoned figures mired so deeply in ugliness that they emerge both uncannily cute and unsuspectedly evocative. Like Francisco de Goya, writes the curator Jodi Hauptman, Redon “traffics in the monstrous and the diabolic, in distortion and degeneration, and deploys line, shadow, and hue to induce sensations of unease and dread”. But, alongside these idiomatic images of anguish, Redon is perhaps best remembered as an artist who influenced (and was influenced by) some of the most electric currents of nineteenth-century literature, both in English and in French.
Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, spent thirty years trying to write about the temptation of Saint Anthony, which, as Colin Dickey argues, found its ultimate realization in Redon’s adaptation of the novel to a series of prints. The French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, who shared Redon’s taste for deformity, described the painter’s typical subject matter in his novel À rebours (1884), helping draw attention to an artist still struggling for recognition:
. . . figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled the ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate man still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs were beyond anything imaginable; they leaped, for the most part, beyond the limits of painting and introduced a fantasy that was unique, the fantasy of a diseased and delirious mind.
Later, this same character describes how Redon seems to have transposed Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, their “mirages of hallucination and effects”, into a different medium. Indeed, it is in a series of six lithographic dreamworlds titled À Edgar Poe, where we find some of Redon’s most evocative works. “What is astonishing in the Poe-Redon fusion”, writes Marina van Zuylen, is that “both artists yearned for rules of composition while portraying creatures that were unruly and decomposing”.
In Un masque sonne le glas funèbre (A mask sounds the death knell), for instance, a face detached from any skull chimes a church bell with its skeletal hand. Here the end of life becomes literal disintegration, recalling Poe’s poem “The Bells”, which begins with festal jingling (birth, marriage) and then decays into the jangling repetition of a dissonant virge:
They are neither man nor woman—      They are neither brute nor human—                  They are Ghouls:            And their king it is who tolls;            And he rolls, rolls, rolls,                        RollsA pæan from the bells!
In other images from the À Edgar Poe series, Redon alludes to Poe while also playing out his own poetics of sight. The pièce de résistance, perhaps, in this regard, is captioned L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers L’INFINI (The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts toward Infinity). To figure out where Redon alights on Poe requires some critical stitching, like Frankenstein assembling the cemetery organs. Van Zuylen connects Redon’s hot-air eyeball to a passage from Poe’s “Berenice”, a late story that picks up one of the author’s favorite themes: the parallel between intellectual realization and erotic longing.
There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning eyes—of sounds, musical yet sad—a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.
While Redon later downplayed his interest in the American author, claiming that he made the lithographs as a gambit for fame, his deep immersion in Poe’s oeuvre becomes all the more visible the longer we look. You can browse the complete À Edgar Poe series below (and three of them for sale as prints in our shop here).


text:
Seeking Enlightenment: Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 24, 2021

When James Joyce — who named his daughter “Lucia” after the patron saint of eyesight, hoping for intercession from his degenerating vision — met Marcel Proust in May, 1922, at a Parisian hotel, he chalked up the awkward encounter to the French novelist’s nocturnal lifestyle. “Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.”
Almost two centuries earlier, the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot visited Puiseaux, just south of Paris, to meet a person “of good solid sense” who had been born blind. Arriving at five in the afternoon, he finds the man amid his morning routine. “He had only been up for an hour, for I must tell you the day begins for him when it is ending for us.” Despite the man’s lack of sight and preference for midnight oil, Diderot discovers that the situation is far from “impossible”: they have a conversation about the world of sight and his host exhibits a sophisticated understanding of optics, describing a mirror, for example, as an object that “sets things in relief at a distance from themselves”. Diderot is delighted. “Had Descartes been born blind”, effuses the philosopher, “he might, I think, have hugged himself for such a definition.”
When Diderot wrote his Lettre sur les aveugles (translated into English as Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See), in which this story appears, blindness had become a topic of philosophical debate. As Mark Paterson notes in Seeing with the Hands, after René Descartes published his essay on optics, La dioptrique (1637), blindness promised to reveal “the relationship between visual clarity and epistemological certainty”. Many treatises on the nature of knowledge, for instance, contemplated those born blind (l’aveugle-né), whose vision was restored later in life. In a thought experiment proffered by William Molyneux and later taken up by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), a person born blind learns the tactile difference between a cube and sphere. After sight is magically restored, they encounter the two geometric forms on a table. Without touching the solid objects, would they be able to tell which is which?
If this hypothetical seems fanciful in retrospect, it was important for one of the most controversial debates of the Enlightenment: is knowledge rational or empirical? That is, do we have an implicit, conceptual, and perhaps God-given sense of the world? Or is it derived from raw observation, whether visual or haptic? In this period, blindness also challenged what the intellectual historian Martin Jay calls the scopic regimes of modernity: those layered metaphors, in Western philosophical history, that equate knowledge and vision. Terms like insight and enlightenment preserve the primal scene from Plato’s cave allegory, where truth or “the good” is represented by the sun, toward which we must continually strive. Yet medical progress migrated these questions away from the world of allegory and onto the mid-eighteenth-century operating table. Diderot was writing during an era when, thanks to advances in cataract surgery, these questions could be tested via a scientific method.
Philosophical discussions of blindness often feature hypothetical, abstract subjects in the place of real people, an optical equivalent to the Enlightenment's fascination with the idea of feral children, raised in isolation from human language and society. Diderot, however, did things differently, for he wrote about actual blind people, whom he interviewed at length — “he is at pains to include details about [his subject’s] family background, education, and household arrangements in order to create a complex image of a living human being rather than a mere abstraction”, writes the scholar Georgina Kleege.
Akin to the epistolary novels that became popular in the 1740s, Diderot’s Letter on the Blind assumes the form of a real letter, penned, it seems, to his occasional lover: Madeleine d'Arsant de Puisieux, author of La femme n'est pas inférieure à l'homme (Woman is not inferior to man), an early feminist treatise. While his correspondent was combating patriarchy, Diderot voiced probing challenges to ableism, by quoting the man from Puiseaux’s response, at length, when asked if would like to have his vision restored:
“If it were not for curiosity,” he replied, “I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me my hands would tell me more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes. . . I would be as well off if I perfected the organ I possess, as if I obtained the organ which I am deprived of.”
In the spirit of perfecting touch, Diderot segues into an extended discussion of Nicholas Saunderson’s system of “palpable arithmetic”, a precursor to night writing and Braille. Saunderson, who held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, was blinded by smallpox in infancy and remains a largely forgotten though brilliant figure, who astounded students with cutting-edge lectures on light and color, had a love for hunting on horseback, and would supposedly offer detailed commentary on the cloud formations that passed between him and the sun during afternoon turns in the park.
Despite his relatively complex and compassionate treatment of the blind, Diderot had an agenda of his own. He interlaced his letter with quiet defenses of atheism, often funneled through quotations from Saunderson, by championing the empirical, scientific method over "religiously tinged rationalism”. The letter concludes with a humorous sigh of defeat, a subtle condemnation of those who claim to know the workings of things in heaven and earth:
Thus we scarce know anything, yet what numbers of books there are whose authors have all pretended to knowledge! I cannot think why the world is not tired of reading so much and learning nothing, unless it be for the very same reason that I have been talking to you for two hours, without being tired and without telling you anything.
A few months after Diderot published the letter anonymously, he was arrested for his godless tone and imprisoned in Vincennes for three months at the age of thirty-five. Shortly after his release, achieved through literary connections, he gained a reputation for co-founding the Encyclopédie, one of the Enlightenment’s pivotal productions. You can browse Diderot’s Letter above, translated by Margaret Jourdain, or purchase Kate E. Tunstall's recent translation here.

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

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


text:
On the Road: The Woman and the Car (1909)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 20, 2021

In the early twentieth century, Dorothy Levitt, née Elizabeth Levi (1882-1922) was “the premier woman motorist and botorist [motorboat driver] of the world”. The first Englishwoman to drive in a public competition, she triumphed during races in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, defeated all challengers at the Championship of the Seas in Trouville, and set the women’s world record in the Brighton Speed Trials: a whopping 79.75 miles per hour — lightspeed, circa 1905.
Like many larger-than-life figures, her origin story is modest, accidental, and layered with hearsay. As a child, she enjoyed cycling, horse-riding, and had a natural talent for riflery. One day, a friend of her parents came to visit their family home in the West Country, leaving his automobile idle for the long weekend. When it was time for the visitor to leave, Levitt had already mastered the physics of petrol combustion.
At least, that’s the story we get from C. Byng-Hall, in his prefatory remarks to Levitt’s The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor (1909). Other biographical tidbits suggest that Levitt worked as secretary for Selwyn Edge, a racing enthusiast and businessman who first popularized the six-cylinder engine, and who, in a bid for publicity, may have handed Levitt the keys. As Jean Williams argues in her contemporary history of women’s sport, Levitt’s West Country heritage has remained “unsubstantiated so far”, a possible autobiographical stunt to obscure her Jewish descent. Before long, however, Levitt was known for burning rubber around the world, often accompanied by her Pomeranian, whom she called Dodo. (Other racers poked fun at her eccentricities by pinning plush canine emblems to their racing caps.)
The Woman and the Car is a practical, how-to guide for those who wanted to take to the roads, but did not quite know how. Many of the extensive recommendations regarding mechanics, etiquette, and the temptations of car culture hold true today. There have always been lemons, it seems, for Levitt remains skeptical of purchasing second-hand cars advertised “as good as new”. And like many enthusiasts, Levitt refused to share her wheels with others. “I have made it a rule never to allow any one to drive my own little car—and this is a rule that every one will find useful.”
In Levitt’s “little handbook”, we find a similar hunger for the fraught freedom of the road that would eventually preoccupy the mid-century American imagination — exploited in novels like On the Road and Lolita, and in films such as Easy Rider — and which continues to provide a mesh of mechanist escapism in the British television program Top Gear:
There may be pleasure in being whirled around the country by your friends and relatives, or in a car driven by your chauffeur; but the real, the intense pleasure, the actual realisation of the pastime comes only when you drive your own car.
Long before motoring became the dull labor of suburban commuting, it held the mystique of an emergent individualism — aimed here, with the reference to chauffeurs and countryside friends, at a certain class of leisurous ladies. “If you stop the night at a friend’s house”, Levitt proffers somewhat cryptically, “you will find it spick and span in the morning with water in the tank and your petrol-tank also replenished”. Oh to have friends like Levitt’s. . .
Other advice in the “chatty little handbook” is wonderfully dated, providing an ossified image of a different motoring era. She recommends, for instance, a single-cylinder engine for women drivers. And her prose swells with delight while describing a proto-version of the glove compartment: “This little drawer is the secret of the dainty motoriste.” On the topic of dress, Levitt offers definitive advice. “As to head-gear, there is no question: the round cap or close-fitting turban of fur are the most comfortable and suitable”. Should you find yourself driving alone on the highways and byways, she thinks you ought to carry a small revolver and even suggests a specific make. “I have an automatic ‘Colt,’ and find it very easy to handle as there is practically no recoil.” Though, as she concedes, this only works if, like her, you “practice continually at a range”. There is a kind of merciless practicality throughout. While Levitt advises “to sound the hooter” when approaching pedestrians, she has no time for other creatures interfering on the road. “Dogs, chickens and other domestic animals at large on the highway are not pedestrians, and if one is driving at a regulation speed, or under, one is not responsible for their untimely end.”
Above all else, The Woman and the Car endures as a pamphlet of petro-feminist empowerment: ※※Indexed under…VehiclesFears of crowds and mice overcome by driving
You may be afraid, as I am, of driving in a hansom through the crowded streets of town—you may be afraid of a mouse, or so nervous that you are startled at the slightest of sudden sounds—yet you can be a skilful motorist, and enjoy to the full delights of this greatest of out-door pastimes, if you possess patience —the capacity for taking pains.
She ends her treatise with a reflection on recent historical progress. “Twenty or thirty years ago, two of the essentials to a motorist—some acquaintance with mechanics and the ability to understand local topography—were supposed to be beyond the capacity of a woman’s brain.” Levitt was not only instrumental in advancing equality behind the steering wheel, she also forever altered the automobile form. Decades before rearview mirrors became standard issue, she recommended that ladies carry a hand mirror, for holding up to the landscape receding in their dusty tracks.
Above, you can browse The Woman and the Car in full. Below, you will find a gallery of photographs by Horace W. Nicholls, illustrating Levitt’s tips.


text:
Flowers of Fire: Illustrations from Japanese Fireworks Catalogues (ca. 1880s)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 29, 2021

The spinning saxon, flying pigeons, polka batteries, jumping jacks and firecrackers, squibs and salutes, Aztec Fountains, Bengal Lights, and Egyptian Circlets, bangers or bungers, cakes, crossettes, candles, and a Japanese design known as kamuro (boys haircut), which looks like a bobbed wig teased out across the stratosphere. . . the language of fireworks has a richness that hints at the explosive payload it references. And yet, anyone who has ever held their camera up to the blazing sky knows that a brilliant firework show can rarely be captured to any satisfying degree. Perhaps this is what makes a nineteenth-century series of catalogue advertisements for Japanese fireworks so mesmerizing: denied the expectations of photorealism, these images are free to evoke a unique sense of visual wonder.
Thought to have been invented in China around the second century BCE, fireworks began as modest bamboo sparklers, advancing toward today’s complex pyrotechnic spectacles with the piecemeal discovery of saltpeter, gunpowder, tubular projectiles, and colorizing salts. While Chinese and European firework histories are heavily documented, Japan’s traditions remain moderately more obscure. Despite excellent pyrotechnic craftsmanship, for example, it was still possible for researchers to write, as recently as 2010, that “comprehensive information encompassing the development of fireworks culture in Japan, the history, and any intricate symbolism, is not widely known or appreciated within Japan, let alone abroad.”
Fireworks appeared in Japan sometime around 1600 and were called hanabi — a combination of the kanji “fire” and “flower”. Japanese innovations have been responsible for a pair of popular firework forms: peonies and chrysanthemums, two subcategories of the larger class of warimono designs. Excellence in craftsmanship arose from competition in nineteenth-century Edo between hanabishi (firework artisans) on either side of Ryōgoku Bridge. As the story is told, passersby would shout Kayiga or Tamaya — the names of the rival master craftsmen — and these names are still shouted during fireworks events in the area today. The rivalry lasted until 1843, when an explosion in the Tamaya shop led to the expulsion of the business from Edo.
The illustrations below come from catalogues digitized by the Yokohama City Library, which contain English-language advertisements for Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks, published by C. T. Brock and Company, the oldest fireworks manufacturer in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1877, the Hirayama company was global from its onset: the founder Jinta Hirayama is thought to have been the first Japanese citizen to register a U.S. copyright.
Of the many intriguing images in these catalogues, it is their inclusion of complex figures, which seem pyrotechnically impossible, that most captivates the contemporary eye. To understand these scintillating and unfamiliar forms (daylight bombshells, parachute light-balls), it is helpful to go back into the annals of a British fireworks dynasty. Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making (1922) is written by a man “the eighth generation of a family of pyrotechnists”: Alan St. Hill Brock, a descendent of John Brock, who founded Brock’s Fireworks Ltd in 1698, publisher of the catalogues under question and still in existence today. According to Brock the author, daylight fireworks originated in Japan and were not really “fireworks” as we have come to know them. Instead of pyrotechnic effects, the daylight projectile contained “a grotesque balloon in the form of an animal, human figure, or other form, which, being open and weighted at the lower end, becomes inflated as it falls and remains in the air for a considerable period.” In the catalogue images gathered here, you will see daylight balloons shaped like frogs, mounted jockeys, and a tortoise-riding fisherman (probably the fairytale protagonist Urashima Tarō, on a journey to the submarine Dragon Palace).
Other “daylight bombshells” appear as collections of objects — somersaulting umbrellas, giant jellybeans — or abstract smears of rich pigments dyeing the sky. Some diurnal fireworks, it seems, functioned more like smoke bombs or piñatas, creating “coloured clouds formed by coloured powder” or showering “streamers, confetti, and toys” on a rapt, land-bound audience. You might notice that several images contain balls of light suspended by parachutes: Brock’s book goes some way toward explaining the history of this technology — “the parachute light-ball” — though he credits its invention to the Danish circa 1820. (While the sections on Japan are perhaps the most illuminating, we also learn about the Green Man, fabulously illustrated by John Bate, and the forgotten pyrotechnic associations of this mythological figure that lends his name to scores of British pubs.)
Despite the novelty of daylight fireworks, the Japanese “night shells” are no less disarming. While explosions were traditionally orange-colored, Hirayama was instrumental in introducing radiant displays. A keen-eyed viewer might even pick up several examples of katamono style — a rarer form of firework capable of spelling out letters and drawing stick figures or faces in the night sky. You can browse the complete catalogues of nineteenth-century Japanese fireworks through the Yokohama City Library., and browse our highlights below. For further reading, pyrotechnic enthusiasts can borrow a digital copy of George Plimpton’s ode to explosions, which discusses Japan’s Ogatsu firework family, at Internet Archive.


text:
John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa (1895)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 7, 2021

“For eighteen years the writer has been seated at this desk and all kinds of books have been passed in review, but has never before met with such a stumper”, wrote the literary critic for Chicago’s The Inter Ocean paper in 1895. And they were not alone. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “an extraordinary literary and scientific work”, a “new candidate for popular favor”. Soon after, the book’s title became a not-uncommon baby name for bookish parents. And, as late as 1986, we find J. Soule Smith (sobriquet: “Falcon”) remarking on the text’s long legacy: “What the author thought would be the puzzle of a few has become the study of the multitude”.
With a reputation such as this, you may be expecting The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Sherlock Holmes novel, or some other enduring classic. And yet, the novel under discussion is Etidorhpa; or, the End of the Earth: the Strange History of a Mysterious Being and the Account of a Remarkable Journey, John Uri Lloyd’s whimsical take on the “hollow earth” genre. Imagine the progeny of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and an experiment in automatic writing by a member of Havelock Ellis’ peyote-munching cohort. Now steep that vision in Masonic paranoia, fringe geological theories, and a surprisingly earnest account of spiritual longing. Let it age a century and only then would you have a text that begins to hold a candle to Etidorhpa.
Published by the Cincinnati-based pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd in 1895, the novel features psychonautical learning long before Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. Indeed, Lloyd is somewhat frank, in scientific journal articles, about his auto-guinea-piggery. As R. J. Smith recounts, Lloyd breezily describes evaluating “the alkaloidal salts of morphine, quinine, cocaine, etc.”, by letting samples of each dissolve upon his tongue. But the author’s biography is equally mind-bending. He dined with Mark Twain, fished with Grover Cleveland, was employed by the Smithsonian to survey the licorice yields of the Ottoman Empire, and left behind one of the most remarkable private libraries in the United States.
The novel’s story feels indebted both to John Symmes’ theory of “Hollow Earth” and the kidnapping of William Morgan by supposed Freemasons. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the mise-en-abymic narrative creates a formal correlate for the supernatural plot. In brief: a man named Johannes Llewellyn Llongollyn Drury, studying occult and alchemic phenomena, receives an unexpected visitor late in the night. A white-haired man teleports into his parlor. As in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, published three years after Etidorhpa, the creepiest quality of this ghostly apparition is not physical but textual. The elderly man entrusts a manuscript to our narrator, recounting events that transpired three decades earlier, and, eventually, introduces himself by the (almost) Old Testament moniker of “I—Am—The—Man—Who—Did—It”.
We jump into the manuscript, which tells of the man’s kidnapping by a secret hermetic society. His captors forced him to prematurely age in order to disguise his identity. Soon after, I—Am—The—Man is indentured to a guide, whose face, “if a face it could be called, was wet, and water dripped from all parts of his slippery person. . . the moisture seemed to ooze as from the hide of a water lizard”. The lizardly usher leads the now-aged man to the underworld (the entrance of which, we learn, is to be found in Kentucky). It’s like Dante meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets contemporary internet conspiracy theories about “the reptilian elite”. As Drury and the creature descend into the earth’s interior, their ever-evolving philosophical debate finds new scenery: forests of colossal fungi; a field of Brobdingnag hands affixed to the bodies of Lilliputians; and the experience of “eternity without time”, which comes with footnotes, whose syntax seems to exhibit the very symptoms of the substance it proclaims to decry:
If, in the course of experimentation, a chemist should strike upon a compound that in traces only would subject his mind and drive his pen to record such seemingly extravagant ideas as are found in the hallucinations herein pictured, or to frame word-sentences foreign to normal conditions, and beyond his natural ability, and yet could he not know the end of such a drug, would it not be his duty to bury the discovery from others, to cover from mankind the existence of such a noxious fruit of the chemist’s or pharmaceutist’s art?
The novel’s title stems from an encounter with a being named “Etidorhpa”, who appears after I—Am—The—Man declines to drink a distillation of “derivates of the rarest species of the fungus family”. Instead of drugs, he is intoxicated by this seraphic creature, whose rhetorical flourishes almost eclipse her physical beauty. “The universe bows to my authority”, she says. “Stars and suns enamored pulsate and throb in space and kiss each other in waves of light; atoms cold embrace and cling together; structures inanimate affiliate with and attract inanimate structures; bodies dead to other noble passions are not dead to love.” She later introduces herself as an entity once known as Venus, but whose true name is Etidorhpa (“Aphrodite” in reverse).
We will leave it to eager readers to discover how this mysterious book ends. But if the text itself is not tantalizing enough, below you can browse illustrations by J. Augustus Knapp (1853-1938), which are as unsettling as the tale that they frame.


text:
700 Years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Art
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 14, 2021

A man wakes deep in the woods, halfway through life. Far from home, unpermitted to return, his heart pierced by grief. He has strayed from the path. It's a dark night of the soul, his crisis so great that death becomes a tempting end. And then, as wild beasts advance upon this easy prey, his prayers are answered. A guide appears, promising to show him the way toward paradise. . .
Today marks the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri's death, the Florentine poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, arguably our most ambitious Western epic. Eschewing Latin, the medieval currency of literature and scholarship, Dante wrote in his vernacular tongue, establishing the foundations for a standardized Italian language, and, by doing so, may have laid cultural groundwork for the unification of Italy.
The poet's impact on literature cannot be overstated. "Dante's influence was massive", writes Erich Auerbach, "he singlehandedly established the expressive possibilities and the landscape of all poetry to come, and he did so virtually out of thin air". And just as the classical Virgil served as Dante's guide through the Inferno, Dante became a kind of Virgil for later writers. Chaucer cribbed his rhythm and images, while Milton's Paradise Lost may have been actually lost, were it not for Dante as a shepherd. The Divina Commedia is a touchstone for works as diverse as fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan verse; Gogol's Dead Souls (1842); and Mary Shelley's Italian Rambles  (1844), which finds the poet at every turn:
There is scarcely a spot in Tuscany, and those parts of the North of Italy, which he visited, that Dante has not described in poetry that brings the very spot before your eyes, adorned with graces missed by the prosaic eye, and which are exact and in perfect harmony with the scene.
If Dante's poetry summons landscapes before its reader's eyes, artists have tried, for the last seven hundred years, to achieve another kind of evocation: rendering the Commedia in precise images, evocative patterns, and dazzling color. By Jean-Pierre Barricelli's estimate, a complete catalogue of Commedia-inspired artworks would exceed 1,100 names. The earliest dated image comes from Florence in 1337, beginning the tradition soon after the poet's death in 1321. Before long, there were scores of other illustrations. As Rachel Owen notes, due to medieval guild production, early illustrations of the Commedia featured highly collaborative work, where a single miniature could pass through multiple hands, introducing variation in style across a single manuscript, but also conventions of representation.
Spanning the Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Romanticism, the images gathered below reflect changing techniques for rendering perspective and summoning humanist pathos. While this evolution might be expected, the consistency with which artists have chosen specific Cantos from the Commedia is almost uncanny. And there are surprising gaps, as well — a dearth of Dantean images during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps in line with Goethe's quip, ca. 1824, that the Italian poet would soon be lost to obscurity. Nothing like this happened, however, for the mid-nineteenth century saw Dante's works become a popular subject for visual artists once again.
There are many reasons as to why the Commedia lends itself to depiction, the most simple being: there is so much to draw upon. Titans chained deep in hell; Ugolino pausing, mid-cannibalistic chomp, to converse with Dante and Virgil; the ecstatic ascent to the Empyrean; and other, seemingly endless configurations of the abject and miraculous.
The three-headed Satan has always been popular, frozen in the ninth circle of hell's last ring. In one of the earliest extant renderings, a Florentine illustration from ca. 1350, each head of the devil masticates Brutus, Judas, and Cassius: the ultimate traitors, whose treachery was itself a form of consumption: dismembering the Roman Republic and the son of God. An Early Renaissance engraving after Botticelli, but also credited to Orcagna, places Satan amid dozens of hellfiends, torturing various tormentees with saws, tridents, and snakes — gathering the evils that Dante has witnessed in previous circles. Francesco Scaramuzza returned to the same figure in the mid-nineteenth century, adding a thick layer of fur and soul piercing eyes.
To get out of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil must climb up the torso of Satan, emerging near the base of Purgatory. The mountain of salvation was formed by displacement: the impact of this angel crashing to earth. This is but one of the many careful harmonies built into the Commedia's totalizing vision. The epic's structure is almost fractal: three lines per stanza; thirty-three cantos per section; and three poetic movements (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), each respectively composed of nine circles, stages, and spheres. While this structure emerges gradually in the poem, artists have long tried to plot its coordinates. Placing Botticelli's well-known, external vision of the Inferno next to a bird's-eye view of Purgatory from 1568 reveals the symmetry between the first two sections of Dante's epic.
Others opt for a more abstracted approach. A 1518 diagram renders hell as a bounded, two-dimensional mineshaft, while in a series of maps from 1855, Michelangelo Caetani makes the funnel-like Malebolge resemble a honeycombed monolith, buried beneath layered earth.
In Paradise, Dante is guided by his beloved Beatrice, who leads him toward the beatific vision. During Cantos 18–20, which take place in the sphere of Jupiter,  they come across the Eagle of Justice, composed of myriad souls. An early Italian miniature (ca. 1450), shows the couple floating against an ultramarine background in conversation with the eagle's more-than-fifty faces. In a late-sixteenth century illustration by an unknown artist, the eagle's souls take on the eerie aspect of skulls. Francesco Scaramuzza adds a Romantic touch, where Dante soars, eyes closed by sublimity, carried on the raptor's talons.
The beatific vision, depicted both by a mid-sixteenth century woodcut and Gustave Doré (1880), capture, in juxtaposition, something of paradise's unchanging promise. The former, mandala-like arrangement positions angels in nine rings around God, while Doré — whose illustrations were so immediately influential that one critic, writing in 1861, felt that Dante and Doré were "communicating by occult and solemn conversations" — puts a blinding light in place of the divine.
As hinted at by the central couple in Doré's image, the Commedia ends with an affirmation of love, at once personal, galactic, and divine. “The love that moves the other stars“ (l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle). As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Inferno and Purgatorio also end with stelle. "So when Dante says that love moves the sun and other stars, what he's really doing is placing himself immediately right back on earth, back at the beginning of his quest. He's here with us looking up at the stars." And we are here with him, as artists have been for centuries, tracing out our own paths through his heavenly designs.
To commemorate the 700th anniversary of the poet's death, we have collected, below, visions of the Commedia from the last seven centuries. Each image is linked through to its source where you can often view more images in a series. And to dive further into Dante's work we highly recommend checking out Columbia University's Digital Dante project.


text:
Astronomia Playing Cards (1829)
Text by Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes
Jul 29, 2021

Hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades — every player (shark or not) is familiar with the four suits in a standard deck. But dig a little deeper into the discard pile of history and you will soon draw up cards adorned with cups, coins, clovers, acorns, and more. For shuffling enthusiasts, there is a distinction to be made between standard and nonstandard packs. The Cary Collection at Yale University holds hundreds of each variety, but it is the latter kind that catches the non-specialist eye, representing the effort to craft “an original pictorial conception”, according to William B. Keller. Forget queens and kings and instead imagine cards painted onto tan hides by Apache tribes and aces inscribed with moralizing mottos such as “use but don’t abuse me”.
One particularly fine example is the Astronomia deck. Transcending the earthly concerns of betting and regal motifs, this pack focuses exclusively on the heavens. From the collection of card aficionado Melbert Cary, which contains another lovely celestial spread from c. 1717, the Astronomia pack — printed in London in 1829 and reissued in 1831 — recalls the mystical origins of playing cards. Whereas the Tarot tradition followed astrology into occult realms, this deck remains soberly astronomical. Above the skyscape on each card is a table of cosmological data for particular extra-terrestrial objects: its distance from the sun, orbital eccentricity, and progression-per-hour are displayed on decorative curtain swags. Were you to fan them across a table, it would be like gazing through fifty-two windows onto outer space, framed by classical stone columns.
The deck’s otherworldly beauty makes it difficult to envision dealing out a hand (though there is a certain appeal to the idea of Saturnine bridge, lunar hold’em, or Martian cribbage). Instead, the anonymous inventor had other ideas up his sleeve: the Astronomia pack was released with an accompanying text, Explanation of the Celestial Cards, that details two games — Conjunction and Combination — with a primer on “the sublime Science of Astronomy”. As far as we can tell, they play similar to whist, requiring four players working in pairs to follow suit (that is, color-coded season) if possible, or to trump the leading card. For suits, however, Astronomia uses color-coded seasons, with Zodiac constellations and other galactic bodies, like the Great Comet of 1680, forming an ersatz royal flush. (Moons earn extra points.)
The night sky has long humbled humans, inspiring us to probe deeper into the internal and external worlds. Astronomia had similar ambitions. Its prefatory manual hopes to “excite the youthful reader to seek a more extensive knowledge of this noble science, or lead him to contemplate, with reverent admiration, the power and wisdom, — the harmony and magnificence, — displayed in the construction of the Universe”.
Below you will find the thirteen cards which make up the summer "suit" and you can riffle through the full Astronomia pack via the Beinecke Library at Yale.

author: Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes


text:
The Future Imagined in Albert Robida’s La vie électrique (1890)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 15, 2021

Who participated in the first video date? A good couple for candidacy in this regard are Georges Lorris and Estelle Lacombe, who meet via “téléphonoscope” in Albert Robida’s 1890 novel Le Vingtième siècle: la vie électrique in which he imagines “the electric life” of the future. Adding a visual component to two recent technologies, the telephone (1876) and the phonograph (1877), this device lets scattered families in the year 1956 reunite around a virtual dinner table. For the lovebirds Lorris and Lacombe, the téléphonoscope facilitates their unapproved liaison in an immunologically fraught world. (And, for those without a beau, it also offers a service akin to on-demand streaming.)
This proto Zoom / Netflix hybrid is just one of several prescient predictions in Robida’s novel. Frictionless trains shoot through tubes, anticipating the Hyperloop, and doorknockers have been replaced with a “recording phonograph with photographic lens”, allowing residents to both screen visitors and take messages in the event of their absence: a smart doorbell before its time.
Biological weapons are the preferred means of warfare and have been calibrated to spare “men in the prime of their strength and health” and target, instead, “the valetudinarians, the weak, the infirm organisms unable to stand [its] putrid fumes”. (A good capitalist, Georges Lorris’s father, Philox, later secures the monopolistic right to manufacture and distribute both the weapon and its vaccine.) While marriage still exists unmodified, honeymoons are obsolete — now engaged couples take voyages de fiançailles to assess their compatibility. There are even airborne cars and taxicabs, with landing platforms affixed above the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame — as well as mass aerial transit in the form of aéronefs-omnibus.
Remembered better as an illustrator than a novelist, Robida was best known for his whimsical drawings of the Belle Epoque in Paris’s La Caricature magazine, which he edited, and for writing eighty books in a variety of genres: histories, children’s stories, and travel guides. Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, The electric life has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life and our near future. “He let his imagination run wild”, writes Robert Hendrick, “and in the process more accurately predicted the technological and social developments of our contemporary world than any other forecaster of his time.”
The electric life’s social progress also outpaced history. By the 1950s, according to Robida, women would work as equals in all professions, smoke in public, operate a ladies-only stock exchange (Bourse des dames), and wear trousers or miniskirts. (In a different novel that shares this same world, one of Robida’s characters describes how “the long skirts of our grandmothers were too inconvenient for climbing into aérostats and, furthermore, most forward-thinking women considered them symbols of their former slavery.”) But freedom has come at a cost — the women in Robida’s novel have been satirically “masculinised”, given names with “harsh character” and “forbidding euphony” in order to prove their seriousness. Less progressive than the future it highlights, much of Robida’s humor comes from what Philippe Willems calls “entre nous jokes between the author and his implied readers”, deriving from “the incongruity of juxtaposing nineteenth-century bourgeois values onto an extrapolated social frame”. In other words, it was easier for Robida and his audience to imagine flying cars than the empowerment of women.
While his sexual politics remain disappointingly regressive, Robida anticipated how the scientific, social, and technological progress afforded by capitalism comes at an ecological cost to the planet. His version of the 1950s dissolves effortlessly into the environmental present: “Our air is dirty and polluted. . . Our rivers carry virtual purees of the most dangerous bacilli; our streams swarm with pathogenic ferments.” Technology cannot trump nature: electrical storms sweep across France disrupting the téléphonoscope. Ironically, like in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the only solution is to cling to the past — that is, Robida’s present. Dotted throughout France are quiet villages, where citizens in the novel have returned to reconstruct nineteenth-century ways of life.
See more past visions of the future here, including additional works by Robida.


text:
Images of Hatha Yoga from the Joga Pradīpikā (19th century)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 13, 2021

Yoga is now everywhere in the West. For some, it is connected to an ancient, ethical philosophy, “a way the sacred can come into life”, according to Stephen H. Phillips. For others, it has become a glorified stretching routine, a warm-up to be completed while decked out in athleisure garbs.
Modern yoga, defined by Elizabeth De Michelis as “the graft of a Western branch onto the Indian tree of yoga”, dates back to the 1800s. De Michelis locates an origin in a letter penned by Henry David Thoreau, claiming that “To some extent, and at rate intervals, even I am a yogi” — one of the first recorded instances of yoga being “taken up by a Westerner while remaining a Westerner”. But the Classical Yoga of the Indian subcontinent has been evolving for thousands of years and can be found in various forms in the texts sacred to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Yoga is difficult to define because of its fractured immensity. The word refers to “that enormous body of spiritual values, attitudes, precepts, and techniques that have been developed in India over at least five millennia”, claims Georg Feuerstein in his canonical The Yoga Tradition. And James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, in composing their Roots of Yoga for Penguin Classics, found it necessary to translate yogic texts from Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, Old Marathi, Avadhi, Braj Bhasha, and English.
The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, one of the most widely practiced modern forms, the yoga of physical discipline. As Singleton notes, however, bodily movements were historically subordinate to breathwork (pranayama), mental focus (dharana), and the yoga of sonic vibrations (nada). Only in the twentieth century, paralleling a rising Indian nationalism, does the corporal dimension begin to dominate, as certain physical strands of the yogic tradition melded with European gymnastics, creating a system to train the body in preparation for anti-colonial resistance.
But these images precede the exportation of hatha to the West, finding their origin in the Joga Pradīpikā, an eighteenth-century text credited to Ramanandi Jayatarama, which combines older kinds of seated meditation with the physical methods of tantra. On display are both asanas (body postures) and mudras (hand gestures or “seals”). While the former positions promote both physical and spiritual alignment, the origins of the latter gestures remain obscure, with Feuerstein claiming that “they undoubtedly are the products of intensive meditation practice during the course of which it is not uncommon that the body spontaneously assumes certain static as well as dynamic poses”. This is the mystery and power of yoga on exhibit here — the potential for the body and mind to spontaneously transform through subtle and exacting movements.  ※※Indexed under…HandsGesturing through
For a history of hatha yoga’s physicality and the Joga Pradīpikā, you can watch James Mallinson’s interview with the British Library here. And you can purchase Mallinson and Singleton’s Roots of Yoga by following this link.


text:
Joseph George Strutt’s Sylva Britannica (1822/1830)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jun 10, 2021

Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination, so powerfully as those venerable trees… to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime, and their decay.
In Sylva Britannica, or Portraits of Forest Trees, Joseph George Strutt (1784–1867) pictures fifty special British trees in etchings and words. Beneath gnarled oaks and chestnuts deer wander, horses mosey, and goats snooze. A pig nuzzles a root, a peacock perches on a branch, a cat ponders a picnic basket. Two travellers look up in quiet awe, a young lad fools with his dog, a reclining shepherd admires his flock. This is the country life glorified and simplified. If the characters could speak one would probably be quoting Duke Senior in As You Like It: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
Strutt chooses tree species long associated with Britain — oaks, elms, yews, ash — as well as a few exotic recent arrivals like cedar and oriental plane. His descriptions owe a debt to John Evelyn, author of the first thorough study of British trees, Sylva (1664), which mixed classical mythology, rhapsodic praise, and practical forestry advice — all in an effort to encourage tree planting. Strutt is more focused on the poetic side of things but nonetheless shares Evelyn’s patriotism and conception of the social value of trees:
An insulated tree… seems the common property of all who raise their humble tenements within sight of its branches, and is one of the delightful ornaments of nature that the poorest cottager may enjoy and be proud of, as he sees the stranger stop to gaze at it. Perhaps there is no country in the world where an admiration of fine trees is so genuinely felt, or so generally diffused, through all ranks, as in England.
A compact, cheaper edition of Strutt’s book was published in 1830, presumably to diffuse the tree love further through the ranks — a scan of which you can browse above. Below we’ve featured a selection of etchings from the original 1822 folio (vastly superior to the reproductions in the 1830 edition) with relevant extracts from the accompanying prose.
***
In the year 1724, a road-way was cut through its venerable trunk, higher than the entrance to Westminster Abbey, and sufficiently capacious to permit a carriage and four horses to pass through.
***
The extremity of its boughs includes a line of one hundred and eighteen feet… When it is in the full pride of its foliage, it strikes the spectator with sensations similar to those inspired by the magnificent Banyan trees of the East… It affords a… singular and striking [spectacle] in the invigorating sharpness of an autumnal morning, when its thousand boughs, and every pendent twig, are gemmed with crystals, reflecting the rays which no longer scorch, and dazzle only to please…
***
Unpruned, unpollarded, throwing its broad arms around in all the freedom and majesty of its nature. It is supposed to have received its name from the accommodation it is so well calculated to afford in its ample canopy, “star-proof,” and its moss-grown roots, to the weary mendicants who may in former times have been tempted to seek the shade of its branches for repose or shelter.
***
A group of oaks known by the names of Majesty, Stately, and Beauty... Seldom are three trees so different from each other in individual character, and so interesting altogether, to be found in such near proximity...
The oaks can still be visited today.
***
It is said by the inhabitants of the village, that seventy persons at one time got within the hollow of the trunk; but, on inquiry, I found many of these were children; and, as the tree is hollow throughout to the top, I suppose they sat on each other's shoulders: yet, without exaggeration, I believe the hollow capable of containing forty men.
Here it is, looking outrageously large, 50 years later.
***
The whole estate, from the very nature of its situation, forming part of the borders between England and Wales, is fraught with historical associations, which extend themselves, with pleasing interest, to this ancient “monarch of the wood,” among whose boughs the war-cry has often reverberated in former ages...
***
The trunk is quite hollow, and altogether its age appears to warrant the idea that it may have witnessed in its infancy those rites and sacrifices of our Saxon ancestors which were held in these shadowy recesses, at once to increase their solemnity, and to shield them from the profane eyes of vulgar observers.
***
Gog and Magog appear in the Old Testament and in Islamic manuscripts either as individuals, tribes, or lands. In the Book of Revelation they are tribes. Early Christian writers turned them into apocalyptic hordes, and throughout the medieval period they were variously identified as the Vikings, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Turanians, and other nomads. Oddly enough, another pair of oaks with the same names, but not featured in Srutt’s book, still stands at Glastonbury in Somerset — though Glastonbury Gog was damaged by fire in 2017.
***
Its aperture is a small, ill-formed gothic arch, hewn out, or enlarged with an axe, and the bark now curls over the wound — a sure sign that it continues growing.
***
Some years ago, this great ornament to Enfield was destined to be cut down by a gentleman who had purchased the spot on which it stood; but the contemplation of its loss excited so much regret and discontent among several of the most respectable inhabitants in the place, that he was obliged to relinquish the barbarous design, even after the trench was dug around it, the saw-pit prepared, and the axe almost lifted up for its destruction.
***
The Poplar, like other trees of the aquatic tribe, copiously exudes the moisture which it imbibes; insomuch that, in hot calm weather, its foliage, like that of the Willow, is additionally grateful from the drops of water that hang upon its leaves, with the refreshing coolness of a summer shower; and which, to a poetical imagination, like that of Ovid, affords a lively picture of the tears of Phaeton's sisters for his loss, completing the beauty of the story which relates their metamorphosis.
The black poplar is nowadays very rare in the UK.
***
Probably the oldest tree now standing in England… Calculation takes us back to the beginning of the reign of Egbert, in the year 800... Since that epoch above a thousand years have rolled over its yet green head. How is it possible, bearing this reflexion in our minds, to look upon its gigantic trunk, and widely spreading arms, without feelings of reverence! How many, not merely generations of men, but whole nations, have been swept from the face of the earth, whilst, winter after winter, it has defied the howling blasts with its bare branches, and spring after spring put forth its leaves again... Nor is it solitary in its old age. Its progeny rises around it, and its venerable roots are nearly hidden by the lighter saplings and bushes that have sought the protection of its boughs, making it appear a grove in itself—a fit residence for some sylvan deity.
***
In general, the trees which in the end obtain the greatest size, are the slowest in growth; it may therefore reasonably be inferred that the age of our largest trees is often far beyond that assigned to them by obscure tradition or vague conjecture; and it is not improbable that the “Four Sisters” may have attained their tenth century.
***
The graceful stateliness of its form, and the beauty of its foliage, [presents] on one side the bright green of the emerald, and on the other a delicate relief of silvery stripes, which, when agitated by the wind, gives it an agreeable variety of appearance.
***
The Fir... perhaps no where attains such perfection as… in those situations in the Highlands where it is most exposed to a northern aspect: for in proportion to the tardiness of its vegetation, in consequence of the little influence of the sun upon it for months together, it completes by slow and sure degrees the health and strength of its timber far beyond that which is nurtured to prematurity of stature in richer soils and warmer situations. This remark may be applied to all other timber trees as well as to the Fir.
***
The philosophical conversations of Socrates are represented as passing under [the Plane tree's] shade.. The Romans thought their most magnificent villas imperfect unless they were sheltered by the lofty and wide-spreading Plane; and the Turks, who treat it with extraordinary reverence, plant it near their dwellings, under the idea that it sheds a salutary influence over the noxious vapours by which the plague is generated... It would be well if we could revive so much of the veneration of the ancients for the Plane, as might induce us, like them, to plant it round our Schools and new Universities: our tiros in philosophy might… inhale under its branches some of the lofty contemplations of their predecessors, practise themselves in the same habits of simplicity, and finally arrive at the same height of intellectual and moral excellence.
***
...lifting its tranquil head over humble roofs, which it has sheltered from their foundation, and affording, in the projections and points around its base, an inexhaustible source of pleasure to the train of village children who cluster like bees around it; trying their infant strength and courage in climbing its mimic precipices, whilst their parents recall, in their pastimes, the feelings of their own childhood; when, like them, they disported under the same boughs.
***
The 16th-century manor house Chequers has been the country pile of British prime ministers since 1921. “The oldest special tree at Chequers is the still-sprouting stump of an Elm,” explains chilternsaonb.org, “reputed to have been planted by King Stephen (1097-1154). Unfortunately it succumbed to Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. Before it was felled, part of the main trunk was used to build a fine cabinet which can be seen in the dining room.”
***
These graceful trees are surrounded by objects of the most interesting nature, their branches almost touch the venerable remains of the Abbey of Dunkeld, whilst the bleak and barren hill which was once Birnham wood rises behind in the distance, and fills the imagination of the spectator... with thoughts of Macbeth, and Dunsinane…
***
At present [the sycamore] is to be found in all parts of the kingdom, especially in Scotland, where it grows to a great size, wearing an undaunted aspect, and throwing out its bold arms, as if in defiance of the utmost inclemency of the skies.
***
It was planted about the year 1596... It is at the present period in full vigour and beauty, combining airy grace in the lightness of its foliage and the playful ramifications of its smaller branches, with solidity and strength in its silvery stem and principal arms. Delightful indeed is it to contemplate the variety and surpassing beauty of many of these 'houses not built with hands,' proclaiming to the viewless winds, the eyes of heaven, and the heart of man, the wisdom and the love of the Eternal Architect, whose fiat calls them into existence, and whose benevolence wills them to live for ages.
***
These venerable Yew Trees stand on a small eminence... overlooking the ruins of Fountains’ Abbey, which celebrated monastery was founded about the end of the year 1132... Under these [seven yew] trees, we are told by tradition, the Monks resided till they built the monastery; which seems to be very probable, if we consider how little a Yew Tree increases in a year, and to what a bulk these are grown. And as the hill side was covered with wood, which is now almost all cut down... it seems as if they were left standing to perpetuate the memory of the Monks’ habitation there during the first winter of their residence.
***
Tradition says that Henry VIII occasionally met Anne Boleyn under the lugubrious shade of its spreading branches… it afforded but too appropriate an emblem of the result of that arbitrary and ungovernable passion, which, overlooking every obstacle in its progress, was destined finally to hurry its victim to an untimely grave.
***
Pennant describes it as measuring fifty-six feet and a half. The same elegant tourist also speaks of it as having formerly been united to the height of three feet… It is now however decayed to the ground, and completely divided into two distinct stems, between which the funeral processions were formerly accustomed to pass.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


text:
On Sprezzatura: Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1903 edition)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 6, 2021

What do Cicero’s orations, the “no-makeup” makeup trend, and Marcel Duchamp’s readymade stunt of submitting a porcelain urinal to an art exhibition have in common? All champion a certain kind of nonchalance — an artfulness that conceals its own artifice. In short, all three are appreciated, not without controversy, for the inimitable essence of sprezzatura.
While the qualities associated with this Italian word have been praised since the classical era, sprezzatura found a modern patron in Baldassarre Castiglione, whose The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano) holds the performance of effortlessness in highest regard. Purporting to be a series of dialogues that took place among courtiers across several evenings in the early 1500s, Castiglione’s treatise achieved widespread renown as a philosophical exploration of etiquette, courtship, and politics. By 1903, more than 140 editions had appeared in almost a dozen languages, making it one of the most distributed books of its period and kind. The Book of the Courtier is perhaps due for rediscovery in the pandemic era — which, for many, has been characterized by the boredom of waiting — as characters suggest different games in order to while away an idle evening.
There are initially some odd ideas. Fra Serafino proposes what he calls a fine game that sounds no fun: “let everyone give his opinion why it is that nearly all women hold rats in hatred, and are fond of snakes; and you will see that no one will guess the reason except myself, who learned the secret in a strange way”. But we never get to hear the answer or how he happened upon this “secret”, because Emilia Pia hushes him, and, with a silent gesture, gives Unico Aretino the chance to speak. Finally, after much courtly throat-clearing, the game is decided: each will take turns “portraying a perfect Courtier, explaining all the conditions and special qualities requisite in one who deserves this title”.
There are some obvious traits, quickly proposed: noble birth, charming character, skill in war. And then Count Ludovico advances his compelling proposal about sprezzatura, which he calls the “one universal rule” concerning graceful behavior: “to avoid affectation to the uttermost”, “to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura]”. Unlike later aesthetic categories such as the picturesque, this one wanted to hide the artful qualities of lived experience. There is nothing to which we must “give greater care than to conceal art, for if it is discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem”. He cites the example of classical orators, who, with monologues memorized, would pretend to extemporize, as if the language was “springing rather from nature and truth than from study and art; the which, if it had been detected, would have made men wary of being duped by it”.
This is the paradoxical cocktail of qualities that define sprezzatura — the achievement of eloquence and honesty through deception and concealment. Paolo D’Angelo in Sprezzatura: Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp (translated into English in 2018) — perhaps the best study to date of Castiglione and hidden ornament — makes use of this effect in the first lines of his preface: “I suppose one could say that I’ve been working on the book for twenty years, even though I wrote it in a few months during the spring and summer of 2004”. There is a certain ease here, a studiously unstudied element. D’Angelo later quotes the Bohemian painter Raphael Mengs, who in 1762 observed that the “paintings which are commonly praised, and esteemed of good taste, are those in which one sees well express the principal objects, with a certain ease, which hides all labour and art”. Other expressions get close to Castiglione’s ideal: French has je ne sais quoi; Latin, ars est celare artem (it is art to conceal art); Japanese, iki, an adjective meaning “subtly elegant, refined with no ostentation”; but nothing captures this kind of aesthetic coolness quite like sprezzatura, which glides off the tongue almost as languidly as the style it describes.
Above you can browse Leonard Eckstein Opdycke’s 1902 translation of Il Cortegiano. While the book was first translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and again in 1727, Opdycke’s effort arose from the scarcity of copies available at the century’s turn. And though our world looks a lot different than courtly life in Urbino during the Renaissance, the city on the Apennine slopes where Castiglione’s book takes place, Opdycke believes that these “pages will lack interest only when mankind ceases to be interesting to man, and will reward study so long as the past shall continue to instruct the present and the future”.


text:
Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 22, 2021

“[W]hat is the use of a book”, asks Alice in the opening scene to Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, “without pictures or conversations?” This question from Alice is at once a critique of her sister’s pictureless tome, and a paving the way for the delight of words and images to follow. Indeed, John Tenniel’s famous illustrations — for both the first edition of Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass — have become integral to how we experience the story, in both books and film. Tenniel, however, was not the first to illustrate the tale. That honor belongs to Carroll himself, whose original manuscript of the story (then titled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”) is littered with thirty-seven of his own sepia-ink drawings. It seems this entwining of word and image — so important to the published version — was there from the beginning.
Carroll's illustrations are slightly more reserved and less caricatured than John Tenniel’s efforts so familiar to us today. In a vertical sketch that stretches out across the manuscript’s right margin, spanning part of the indelible mushroom scene, Alice’s “immense length of neck” assumes the form of a fuzzy tree trunk, capped with an almost Pre-Raphaelite face, which gazes solemnly across the distant forest below. It's an oddly mournful countenance that recurs throughout. On the final page Carroll stuck a small photographic portrait of Alice Liddell (1852–1934) the family friend for whom he wrote (and drew) the story. Underneath the photograph is his attempt at a drawn portrait, with which he seems to have been displeased enough to cover with the photograph. Did he intend his heroine to look like Alice herself? It's not so easy to tell, though there is something of her look in his drawings.
The manuscript was presented to Alice so that she could revisit a story that he had improvised while rowing her and her sisters down one of Oxford’s rivers. As Carroll put it:
Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream. . .and many a fairy tale had been extemporized for their benefit. . .yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its golden afternoon. . .
While unsubstantiated theories about the author’s consumption of hallucinogenic compounds or undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy are often trotted out as an explanation for the fictional Alice’s phantasmagoric adventure, the other-worldly pleasures of these idle river trips seem to be a more likely source for the unparalleled visions of Wonderland. As Walter de la Mare observed, when writing about Carroll, “afternoons in July, if fair and cloudless, are apt to be narcotics. The rhythm of sculling quiets the mind and sets the workaday wits drowsing”.
In addition to his clerical and mathematical pursuits, Carroll was as much a visual artist as a storywriter. In 1899, there was enough unpublished material for his nephew, Stuart Carroll Collingwood, to publish The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, a collection of lesser-known texts, many complete with illustrated margins, alike in kind to “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”. Carroll was also a talented photographer, keeping a darkroom in his College rooms. As Diane Waggoner has argued, “Carroll’s photographs of children equaled the status of his children’s books. His pictures served as a vehicle for the emotional and imaginative appeal of. . . childhood”. A similar set of concerns and proclivities can be glimpsed in his original Alice illustrations, which capture both the playful innocence and unselfconscious sincerity of childhood adventure.
When Carroll decided to publish his story, excising certain family-specific details from “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”, he chose John Tenniel (1820–1914) as illustrator, well-known for his cartoons in the magazine Punch. Tenniel based several of his drawings, engraved onto woodblock electrotypes by the Dalziel brothers, off of Carroll’s own illustrations, but found the Oxford Don to be rather exacting with his interventions. Some of this scrupulousness was warranted: Tenniel introduced several interpretive ambiguities into his illustrations, few of which escaped Carroll’s notice, or his time-consuming calls for correction. And, after working on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tenniel initially declined to illustrate Through the Looking-Glass (1871), which scholars have read as a sign that the collaboration between author and illustrator had temporarily soured.
Below you can browse all thirty-seven of Carroll’s manuscript illustrations, which carry bittersweet associations. On one hand, it is a joy that they have survived. It was treasured by Alice Liddell until she was forced to auction the text in 1928 to pay for her husband’s death duties. Thankfully, it was eventually purchased, after passing through the possession of several intermediary owners, by American benefactors, who donated the manuscript to the British Library as a symbol of a special, postwar relationship between the nations in 1948. On the other hand, these illustrations conjure an unfathomable depth of creative loss when we remember that the Alice stories were just a few of the many “original, funny, starling, and brilliant” tales that Carroll extemporized for children, most of which were never transcribed or drawn at all, only given over to the wind and river on idle summer afternoons.


text:
Festooned: Martin Gerlach’s Decorative Groupings (1897)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Aug 5, 2021

A prolific engraver and photographer, Martin Gerlach (1846–1918) made his name by founding an eponymous publishing company in Berlin. After relocating to Vienna, he launched a series of children’s books, Jugendbücherei, which featured illustrations by Carl Otto Czeschka, Gustav Klimt, Franz Wacik, and other artists, many in vogue or soon to be. Eventually starting the Polygraphic Art Institute with Ferdinand Shenk, Gerlach passed on his business and artistic legacy to his son, also named Martin Gerlach (1879–1944), who adopted a surrealist approach to photography.
Below you will find a set of images from one of the lesser-known works by Gerlach (senior), Festons und Decorative Gruppen aus Pflanzen und Thieren (Festoons and Decorative Groups of Plants and Animals), originally published in 1893. It is a quintessential “book of examples”, a reference manual meant for inspiring artists and artisans designing plaster, textile, wallpaper, and wood, with an aesthetic adjacent to Art Nouveau. Similar to Karl Blossfeldt’s experiments with magnified photography, Gerlach’s collotype images arrange natural elements with such precision as to make them seem almost artificial. They anticipate, to an uncanny degree, the modernist boxes of Joseph Cornell, where paper cut-out parrots live in palimpsestuous ecosystems of color, pattern, and text. And yet, Gerlach’s festoons, swags, and friezes feel less like dioramas or mixed-media collages and more like fantastical worlds frozen in place.
Part of the brilliancy, here, comes from the use of borders and frames, which look like Instagram layouts circa 1895. Orchids almost writhe in front of a cornsilk-colored panel. Crayfish crisscross cattails, arranged in rings with the circumference of a serving platter. And a cockatoo gets spotlit in the negative, cocking its head over leaves of Monstera deliciosa. Each image is positively baroque, but never overwhelming. These still lives are exactly that: still lives — quiet scenes lifted from the decomposing stream of time. There’s a winking suggestion throughout that the flora and fauna might awake from their collotype fixity and bloom into full saturation once again.
You can browse our highlights from the third (and final) 1897 edition of Gerlach’s Festons und Decorative Gruppen, held by the Rijksmuseum, below. The 1893 edition can be viewed here.


text:
William Blake’s The Gates of Paradise (1787-93)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 21, 2021

“In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity”, writes Peter Ackroyd in his biography of William Blake. What holds true for this prophetic poet’s collected works also appears in miniature within The Gates of Paradise. Babies lay dormant, cocooned and buried, while an elderly man enters the dark behind death’s door. But there is no clear order. The old man may well discover that his threshold leads back into the earth, from which he will emerge as a child again.
Blake drew The Gates of Paradise during a visionary period, an intensification of the eidetic images that he had seen throughout his life. He experienced specters of the dead rising up before him — kings, friends, and angels — and found it difficult to complete the commercial illustrations that he had been hired to engrave. Instead, Blake turned inward. Beginning in 1787, he drew a series of sixty-four images over six years, and eventually etched seventeen of these onto copper plates. Originally released with a subtitle of For Children (the version featured in this post), Blake later redesigned the series as For the Sexes. In one sketch of a title page never realized, the poet shifts into a darker register, renaming the series For Children: The Gates of Hell. Similar poles — between heaven and hell, childhood and maturity — would form the bounds of his well-known diptych, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789).
Unlike Blake’s most famous engravings, which interlace text and image, the visual dimension dominates across The Gates of Paradise. Here we can see Blake’s interest in “emblem literature” — sixteenth and seventeenth century books that link an allegorical symbol to an epigram or motto, such as Francis Quarles’ Emblems (1635), George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635), and Devises et Emblemes Anciennes & Modernes (1699). The reputation of this format has suffered from its bludgeoning moral quality, which one scholar describes as a genre that never escapes mediocrity and doubles down on the banal. But Blake makes a sometimes tiresome tradition strange once again.
While they touch upon Christian themes, The Gates of Paradise are shocking for their scenes of vibrant ecology, human figures mixed and remixed with the earth. In an image coupled with the phrase “I found him beneath a Tree”, a female figure yanks smiling children up from the ground, like unrooting carrots, recalling folklore related to the mandrake: how its screams signal a hellish fate for whomever harvests the root. Paired with the caption “What is Man!”, a caterpillar gazes on a leaf-bound larva with the face of a child, summoning Blake’s proverb in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priests lays his curse on the fairest joys”. Elsewhere: angels emerge from avian eggs; a pining figure follows his desire up a ladder, away from the world. Even the elements themselves are embodied. “Earth” is a squat man entombed alive and “Air” becomes a body lacking enclosure, a preoccupation across Blake’s The First Book of Urizen (1794).
Most disturbing is a figure similar to God the Father, whom Blake was wont to call Nobodaddy. Here the anthropomorphized deity resembles Saturn, maiming his angels by clipping their wings (“Aged Ignorance”) and staring almost directly into our gaze alongside the question, “Does thy God O Priest take such vengeance as this?” If “the mystic sought union with God”, writes Helen C. White, “Blake sought a restoration of the soul to the life of vision.” Profoundly religious, Blake nevertheless eschewed the fetters of church and dogma, chartering a unique course toward his paradisiacal gates. As Matthew Hargraves recounts, Blake, near death, explained how “his physical body might be ‘feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in the Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever.’”


text:
John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778)
Text by Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes
Jul 20, 2021

It’s too late to save the leg, which has been bitten off below the knee. But Brook Watson, the floating blonde youth depicted in Copley’s oil painting, will be rescued from the jaws of this tiger shark and go on to enjoy a long life as a London merchant, becoming Lord Mayor in 1796 and a baronet in 1803. His rise bred envy: “in spite of his later elevation”, wrote one of Copley’s detractors, “there are those whose sympathy is with the shark”.
Though based on true events, we view this work from the distant vantage of its artist’s imagination: Copley had never visited Cuba, the backdrop of his fearful tableau. Born in Boston in 1738, he enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist — with sitters including the likes of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams — gaining international fame for a study of his half-brother Henry Pelham, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Although Copley’s sitters and social circle included people from both sides of the political divide, as tensions mounted in the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, the artist found himself liable through marriage. His father-in law, Richard Clarke, was one of the Tory merchants whose product had been destroyed during the Boston Tea Party. When a group of independence-seeking Whigs threatened Copley, he set off abroad.
With this change of scenery came a change in style, as Copley, influenced by a Grand Tour of the continent, began to depict not just individuals but dramatic and historic landscapes. In Watson and the Shark, he reanimates an adventure that occurred in the waters around Havana, when the artist was just eleven years old. As the cabin boy Watson went for a swim, he was ambushed by sharks. The crew members fended off a third assault and dragged the boy (now missing his right leg) back aboard.
Although it was a somewhat recent development in historical painting to portray contemporary events rather than biblical, classical, or military scenes, Watson and the Shark in many ways belongs to a longer aesthetic lineage. Several scholars have traced the debts that Copley owes to previous artworks, in terms of composition, anatomy, and metaphorical import. Watson has a similar body and posture (though rotated and semi-submerged) to the Borghese Gladiator (from the third century BCE), while his profile repeats that of Laocoön from the same era (Monique Webber discusses this statue in a PDR essay from 2016). Ellen G. Miles suggests the influence of earlier works such as Raphael’s George and the Dragon on Copley’s triangular composition and notices the influence that Charles Le Brun’s investigations into facial expression exert on the sailors’ painted visages.
One of the more prominent figures is the Black sailor who watches over the violent scene. Copley’s first sketches of the composition included a different, white figure, but for the final painting, he included this man, who appeared elsewhere in a standalone portrait by Copley, but whose identity remains unknown. The historian Louis P. Masur called this sailor “one of the most important representations of a black person in all of eighteenth-century Western art”. Many have pointed to the almost umbilical affinity between the distressed Watson and the cryptic sailor, who stands above the chaos and holds the rope that crosses Watson’s arm and seems to join his flowing blonde hair. Several other critics, including Michelle Wallace, Albert Boime, and Alan Rice, draw attention to the numerous descriptions in travel anthologies during the Atlantic slave trade of corpses being thrown to sharks. While Watson will be saved and is here rendered as a figure of resurrection (nude, bathed in light), so many others were never rescued from these waters.


text:
Alien Aqueducts: The Maps of Martian Canals
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 8, 2021

Long before David Bowie asked if there was life on Mars, a wealthy American astronomer arrived on a clear-cut answer: yes, and it built canals.
The groundwork for this theory was laid in 1877, when Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping the planet's surface from the Brera Observatory in Milan, where he served as director. Thanks to a slight abnormality in the Merz refractor telescope installed three years earlier, known as overcorrected chromatic aberration, his equipment was unintentionally calibrated for viewing the Red Planet. And then the stars, as it were, further aligned: he timed his observation with a biannual cosmic pattern, an event known as opposition, when Mars moves closest to the Earth. Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately --- shapes that resembled dim lines, crisscrossing the extraterrestrial desert.
Despite being colorblind, there was no question of the observer's integrity. Like the telescope, Schiaparelli had honed his body to be a superior astronomical instrument. He abstained from "everything which could affect the nervous system, from narcotics to alcohol, and especially from the abuse of coffee, which [he] found to be exceedingly prejudicial to the accuracy of observation." With clear eyes, Schiaparelli saw intoxicating landscapes and named the linear features canali: a word that, in Italian, can stand for both natural, geological trenches and manufactured channels. Other notable astronomers, such as Henri Joseph Perrotin and Louis Thollon, soon saw them too.
Historians offer different theories for what happened next. Some think alien life was found in translation, as, unlike canali, the English "canals" primarily conjures trenches dug by intelligent life. Others credit the recent completion of the Suez Canal (in 1869) for priming the popular imagination with canaliform desires. And still others believe that it is a question of Gestalt psychology, with Mars serving as an interplanetary Rorschach test on which to project one of our species' oldest questions: are we truly alone?
Schiaparelli's research was championed by one astronomer in particular: Percival Lowell, brother of the Imagist poet Amy Lowell. A polymath and Boston Brahmin, as labelled by his biographer David Strauss, Lowell led the kind of life only possible for a certain class of individual in the nineteenth century. He spent his thirties in East Asia, writing books with titles like The Soul of the Far East (1888) and Occult Japan (1895), which includes a chapter on demonic possession, and served as Foreign Secretary for the first Korean delegation to visit the United States. Not everyone approved of Lowell's roving, intellectual or otherwise. "Poor Percy," the philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardener once remarked, "[h]e takes a great interest in everything. . . but there is always something pathetic about him. . . his pleasant things always seem to fall flat." In 1893, the bachelor Japanist returned to America and turned his attention from demons to angels: traces of life in the night sky.
To assist his new hobby, Lowell bought himself equipment: an observatory built from scratch in Flagstaff, Arizona. He soon released a trilogy of studies: Mars (1895); Mars and its Canals (1906); and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). His thesis? Simple: Schiaparelli's canals were actually the irrigation channels of an advanced civilization that funneled water from its polar caps in accordance with seasonal demand and a changing climate. Weirder still, the Martian canals were not able to be reliably observed (William Henry Pickering, one of the assistants in Flagstaff, could not see the channels, despite looking through the same equipment where they materialized for Lowell and Andrew Ellicott Douglass). There is some evidence that the whole affair was a collective hallucination, arising from an error built into human pattern recognition. As Klaus Hentschel details, when a group of Cambridge schoolboys were shown drawings of Martian topography without canals, and asked to duplicate the images, their sketches often inserted thin lines where there were previously none.
Despite blundering on the global stage, Lowell's observatory went on to search for proof of the mysterious Planet X, thought to orbit beyond Neptune. The dwarf planet Pluto now bears his initials in its name. And although he did not discover alien infrastructure, Lowell built another kind of foundation: neither H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds nor Orson Welles' radio adaptation (and the popular delusion it inspired) would have been possible without Lowell's original Martian fever. ※※Indexed under…MarsCanals ofX (letter)to signify the unknown


text:
The Zodiac Man
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 25, 2021

If you read the broadsheets, tabloids, or periodicals, you may have noticed a recent trend. “Why are Millennials So Into Astrology?” asked the bewildered Atlantic in 2018. The Guardian found the issue compelling enough to publish two different articles on the subject three days apart. A year later, the New Yorker featured an exposé on “millennials who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science”. And the New York Post wrote that “millennials are flocking to astrology”, failing to note its own horoscope section. Even the Financial Times could not help commenting on stargazing’s “strange rebirth”.
Humans often look to the stars in times of uncertainty. And the stars — in a tradition of illustrations known as Homo signorum, or, more popularly, the zodiac man — have exerted a strange pull on the human form. In this genre of images, artists feature zodiac symbols alongside or atop the parts of the body they were thought to influence — sometimes even pictured as being attached by ropes. In one version (pictured above), from a fifteenth-century English folding almanac written in Latin, we see a Christ-like figure overcome by animal and allegorical signs. He stands on the fish of Pisces, the crab of Cancer scuttles up his chest, and Gemini twins weigh down the arms. In place of a halo, the goat and bull (Capricorn and Taurus) float above his head with dopey expressions.
These images were, in most cases, didactic. Surgery had to be timed for when the stars were well-aligned, or, at least, not in opposition to the body part undergoing treatment. To alleviate headaches in seventeenth-century England, for instance, bloodletting was avoided “when the moon was in Aries, since this sign governed the head and face”, writes Katherine Foxhall. Below you will find a table of correspondences between body parts and astrological positions, courtesy of Harry Robin’s The Scientific Image: From Cave to Computer:
ARIES: head, eyes, adrenals, blood pressureTAURUS: neck, throat, shoulders, earsGEMINI: lungs, nerves, arms, heads, fingersCANCER: chest wall, breasts, some body fluidsLEO: heart, spine, upper back, spleenVIRGO: abdomen, intestines, gallbladder, pancreas, liverLIBRA: lower back, hips, kidneys, endocrinesSCORPIO: reproductive organs, pelvis, urinary bladder, rectumSAGITTARIUS: thighs, legsCAPRICORN: knees, bones, skinAQUARIUS: ankles, blood vesselsPISCES: feet, some bodily fluid
Unlike many ancient and early modern esoteric practices, it is difficult to delimit the zodiac man to a specific region, religion, or civilization. We find similar images in manuscripts from Persia, where the signs appear as if swimming through the zodiac man’s bloodstream, and collected in Antiquities of Mexico (1831) — the Viscount of Kingsborough Edward King’s facsimile of artefacts from the indigenous peoples of the Americas — whom he believed to be a lost tribe of Israel. In a plate from this volume, Nahuatl zodiac signs (cozcacuauhtli, the vulture, and tecpatl, flint or an obsidian knife, for instance) appear like kites strung to the zodiac man’s eye, toes, mouth, and chest. And coatl, the serpent, slithers menacingly toward his genitals.
In Europe, images of the zodiac man formed part of a larger medieval episteme or constellation of knowledge. Humans were microcosms, whose health was influenced by the motion of celestial spheres, an idea that found analogues in Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Vedic, Mayan, and Aztec cosmologies. In a subgenre of zodiac man images, he is enclosed in an egg-like shell, encircled by astrological creatures. The zodiac man was a reflection of his firmament. For more on the zodiac man, you can read Lawrence Parmly Brown’s comparative history on the subject from 1921 and browse the examples below.


text:
A Treatise on Artificial Limbs (1899)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 7, 2021

Published at the century’s turn, George Edwin Marks’ treatise on prosthesis sought total knowledge. Not merely a history of artificial limbs, it spans more than five hundred pages, containing eight hundred illustrations. “An effort has been made to parallel every possible case of amputation”, begins the Preface, so that “[a]ny person who is maimed in leg, arm, foot, or hand will be able to find a case almost identical with his own”. Due to the injuries incurred during the Napoleonic Wars and the U.S. Civil War — and subsequent cultural representations and (often perverse) public fascination regarding amputees in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture — this Treatise bookends a period of maximum need and increased visibility.
Marks begins his historical treatment close to home: describing the genius of his relatives, the American brothers D. B. and A. A. Marks, who patented an artificial leg in 1854. Though business was initially slow — causing brother D. B. to hang up his limb-making hat — soon A. A.’s genius modernized the field, which, until the mid-nineteenth century, “was but the relic of the sixteenth and seventeenth century”, claims Marks, referring to the lasting influence of Ambroise Paré and Pieter Verduyn. The key to this prosthetic revolution, as we eventually learn, involved mechanical advancements in adjustable articulation. But first, history. We are led on a breathless tour of classical prosthesis — see Herodotus on the wood-footed Elean, “avowed enemy of the Lacedemonians”, for example, or Pliny on M. Sergius, the general who ruled with an iron fist. Mere paragraphs later, Marks arrives in the 1800s, during the introduction of so-called Cork Legs, which hold “a comely and approximately natural shape” when compared to “the primitive peg leg”. Marks is quick to demonstrate his expertise: cork was never actually used to any considerable extent, being too “friable and insufficiently resistant”. This does not stop the author from delving into literary history — he cites the anonymous “Song of the Cork Leg” and Thomas Hood’s unfortunate couplet, which addresses a Countess by rhyming stump and plump.
Soon A. A. Marks made an international impact. The Japanese Embassy visited his New York factory and the doctor Kawasaki accepted a gift with “great pleasure and many thanks” — one of Marks’ most beautiful models. But Marks had stiff competition abroad: the Count de Beaufort’s inflexible wooden leg had captured the European market. In an effort to improve upon his model and absorb the lumbery shock, Marks (the leg maker) added a rubber foot, which did more to lessen the sufferings of amputees than “any discovery the world has seen”.
If George Marks’ pamphlet is beginning to sound like propaganda for the family business, it might be forgiven due to the scope of its author’s empathy, however economically minded. His prosthetic history transforms into a sociological study of class — as Marks, sounding more like Marx, describes the asymmetrical precarity of industrialism — and then again into a medical discussion of “fit”, illustrating myriad prosthetic solutions for various kinds of bodies. While undoubtedly well-intentioned, [scholars of disability such as Katherine Ott](https://books.google.fi/books?id=cJm2qZw3CdAC&lpg=PP1&dq=history of prosthesis marks&pg=PP3#v=onepage&q&f=false) point out that manuals like these played into a wider cultural desire “to make the everyday into something exotic”. And the focus is always on the “maimed”, structured by pity and stories of loss, never on congenital difference.
One gets the sense, three hundred or so pages into the treatise, that Marks is almost modernist in his ambition and genre. Like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the Treatise seeks the universal in individual experience, with its seemingly endless considerations of specific trades (train conductor, farmer, house doctor, amanuensis) and the tailored physical requirements of work. Marks ends his text with the epistolary voices of those who benefited most from prosthesis. Hundreds of letters, dated and signed, are reproduced across scores of pages, testifying to the life-changing effects of artificial limbs.


text:
Visualizing History: The Polish System
Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green
May 5, 2021

How does one visualize history and chart time? Is it a line, moving forever outward in one direction? A Grecian temple, as Emma Willard envisioned, with Ionic columns representing centuries, receding from view toward a vanishing point at the world’s origin? Or could it be a corkscrew ascending upward, allowing us to look down from our present position into past events similar to our own?
For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid — or at least it was for the purposes of remembering it. The so-called “Polish System” originated in the 1820s and was later brought to public attention in the 1830s and 1840s by General Józef Bem, a military engineer with a penchant for mnemonics. As Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg catalogue in their Cartographies of Time, the nineteenth century brimmed with new methods and technologies for committing historical information to memory — and Jażwiński’s contribution (and its later adaptations) proved one of the most popular.
The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard.
In addition to the colored grid, Jażwiński also explored other ways of making events easy to remember within the gridded matrix. One of the most striking of these was the idea of “chronological constellations”, laid out in part two of his Méthode polonaise (1835). Here historical events marked in the grid would become guiding points within a larger shape, as stars function in a heavenly constellation — “sometimes it's a chair, a sickle, a boat, a letter of the alphabet, etc.”
From Poland, Jażwiński’s system moved westward. In the 1830s, for instance, it became an official pedagogical tool for teaching history across France. By the 1850s, a revised and improved version preoccupied educators in the United States and Canada. Here the chart was imagined to be a technology of almost limitless potential. As Nelson Loverin wrote, in his grandly-titled Loverin’s Chart of Time (1882), the Polish System’s “centograph” allowed the student to “[c]ultivate the memory by using the eyes, and their nerves of induction as feeders of the grand optic centres, the reservoirs of the mind”. The North American variation was popularized due to the efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who opened the first English-language kindergarten, and shared a Transcendentalist philosophical outlook with her brothers-in-law Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It seems Peabody revised the original system in 1850 with the publication of her The Polish-American System of Chronology. To increase granularity, her chart further divides up the (previously) smallest unit into a 3x3 grid, which offered the opportunity to indicate the nature of the remembered historical event — spatializing the births and deaths of people, nations, and technologies.
For Peabody, temporal grids were more than geometric memory palaces; they had the potential to “lay the foundations of historical knowledge in the minds of the young”. In the age of digital databases, where historical dates are offered up by search engines with a quick tap of the thumb, this might seem like a quaint and antiquated ambition. But the stakes of forgetting are palpable in Peabody’s text. Chronological knowledge is a gateway to democratic power, she believed, recalling “the time, within the memory of our living parents, when the boundaries of nations, and their relations in space to each other, were known only to the few cultivated persons who had sufficient activity of imagination to picture them out by means of descriptions in words”. The Polish System fixed this: no longer did a student have to create a picture of the world out of words — now global history could unfurl on a grid before their eager eyes.

author: Hunter Dukes and Adam Green