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Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)

Sep 27, 2016

Deriving its title from the word for "ghost story" in Japanese Kwaidan is a book by scholar and translator Lafcadio Hearn in which are compiled an array of ghost stories hailing from Japan. Hearn writes in his introduction, written only months before his death, that the majority of the stories were translated from old Japanese texts (some of which themselves were based on earlier Chinese tales), although one of the stories, "Riki-Baka", he declares to be of his own making, based on a personal experience. Unmentioned in the introduction, another of the stories — "Hi-Mawari", written in the first person —  appears almost certainly to be born from his own experience also, a recollection of a childhood experience in Wales (he'd spent time near Bangor when a child living with his Aunt). Among the many curious and spooky happenings related in the other stories, we hear of a musician called upon to perform for the dead, man-eating goblins, a mysterious face appearing in a cup of tea, and, rather terrifyingly, a featureless girl with a face as smooth as an egg. The final section of the book, titled "Insect-Studies", is a presentation of Chinese and Japanese superstitions relating to the insect world, specifically butterflies (personifications of the human soul), mosquitoes (Karmic reincarnation of jealous or greedy people) and ants (mankind's superior in terms of chastity, ethics, social structure, longevity and evolution).
In 1964, Masaki Kobayashi's highly acclaimed Kwaidan was released, a Japanese anthology horror film based on stories from Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales, mainly his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things after which the film was named.


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The Over-Incubated Baby (1901)

Aug 10, 2016

Great short film directed by illusionist-turned-filmmaker Walter R. Booth and produced by Robert W. Paul. A mother brings her baby to Professor Bakem's newly invented baby incubator, which claims to give one year's worth of infant growth in just one hour. However, things go a little awry for this customer, after a spillage and resulting fire cause the device to overheat while her baby is inside. When the “child” eventually emerges, the mother is met with a distressing surprise.

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Finnish Opera Singer Eino Rautavaara (1905–9)

Oct 4, 2016

Featuring a mix of classical and traditional Finnish songs, these recordings were made between 1905 and 1909 by Finnish opera singer Eino Rautavaara (1879–1939). After several years studying abroad in Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Milan, Rautavaara served from 1912 as the Helsinki Kallio church cantor and a teacher at the Church Music Institute from 1922. He was the father to Einojuhani Rautavaara (pictured above with his father), who grew to become one of Finland's most notable composers. Eino died when his son was just 11 years old, and Einojuhani himself passed away this summer, in July 2016.


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Opium Destruction, San Francisco (1914)

Sep 22, 2016

In the shadow of an unfinished City Hall, still clad in scaffolding, government authorities destroy confiscated opium in downtown San Francisco, 1914. Setting fire to the stash they create a great plume of smoke and, presumably, some pretty lightheaded bystanders downwind.


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Contents of an Ostrich’s Stomach (ca. 1930)

Aug 23, 2016

Taken by Frederick William Bond, photographer at the Zoological Society of London, this unusual  image shows the contents of an ostrich's stomach extracted after its death. While the bird is more commonly known to feast on a diet of roots, leaves, seeds, and flowers (with the occasional snake or lizard thrown in if needed), this ostrich seemed to have had a particular penchant for the high street fashion accessory. Amongst the items retrieved and noted down by Bond on the back of the photograph were two handkerchiefs (one lace) and a buttoned glove — presumably items expelled from the daily stream of visitors to the zoo, a sad consequence of the bird's urban existence. Also found were a length of rope and various metal items, including assorted coins, tacks, staples and hooks, and a four-inch nail. Its perhaps not too surprising to learn that this last item was the cause of death.


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Details from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1500)

Aug 9, 2016

Painted sometime between 1490 and 1510, The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps Hieronymus Bosch's most ambitious work. Formed of three panels and totalling almost four metres in length, the triptych is a dizzyingly detailed and delightfully surreal work, the possible meanings of which have kept scholars busy for centuries.
The left panel — sometimes referred to as the Joining of Adam and Eve — is home to a paradise-like scene from the Garden of Eden, most likely of that moment in which God presents Eve to Adam. Although it clearly has its routes in the Biblical story, Bosch's particular take on it — with its strange beasts, Adam's almost-lustful gaze – is unlike anything else depicted in the history of Western art. The middle panel, the largest of the three, seems to continue from the "first" (the triptych is most likely meant to be read from left to right), with their skylines matching up. The settings also seem to echo each other, though the middle panel is quite different in tone. Here the scene is one of unbridled frolic, the landscape teeming with naked figures, along with various oversized animals, plants, and enormous fruit — a mixture of the real and fantastical. With so many cavorting nudes there is an undoubtedly erotic element to the panel, yet one shot through with a feeling of innocence. According to the Bosch scholar Wilhelm Fraenger, this eroticism is of ambiguous import, at once an allegory of spiritual transition and a playground of corruption. Chromatically the right panel differs markedly from the others and is clearly a depiction of Hell, a familiar setting for the works of Bosch. And he doesn't hold back. The scene screams with weird and nightmarish imagery: knife-wielding giant ears, man-eating bird-monsters, unwanted advances from a porcine nun, and in one remarkable tableau, a giant pink monster singing from a musical score emblazoned on a human backside.
Closing up the left and right panel reveals the exterior panels of the piece: what is almost certainly a depiction of the creation of the world. The tiny figure of God can be seen in the upper left hand corner, and above him is inscribed a quote from Psalm 33 — Ipse dixit, et facta sunt: ipse mandāvit, et creāta sunt — For he spake and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.
In celebration of the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death (he died on 9 August 1516), we offer up a selection of details from this his most famous picture. By doing so we hope to show a little of his genius and encourage you to explore this remarkable work for yourselves. For those with a strong internet connection (we couldn't actually manage it ourselves) we highly recommend having a go at downloading the enormous digital version (more than 30,000 pixels wide) here on Wikimedia Commons.


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The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich (1909)

Aug 25, 2016

Although the idea of some kind of bread or bread-like substance lying under, or enclosing another food, can be traced back to the middle ages and beyond, the modern sandwich as we know it, with its enigmatic name, is a more recent affair. Its etymology hails from the English county of Kent and the habits of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century aristocrat. Legend has it that, in search of a way to eat without ceasing his much-loved games of cribbage and sullying his cards with grease, he began to order from his valet meat inserted between two pieces of bread. The idea caught on and others began to order "the same as Sandwich!". Sandwich's biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, contests the gambling angle: with the Earl's work commitments in mind, he argues that the eating would much more likely have been at his work desk. Whether tending to Britannia's rule of the waves or indulging his gambling addiction, the idea and name spread quickly. Not long after the Earl's first order, the sandwich appears by name in the diary entry of a man named Edward Gibbon who saw “twenty or thirty of the first men of the kingdom” eating them in a restaurant. Although the sandwich became well established in England, the uptake in the US was a little slow (perhaps in opposition to their former rulers), a sandwich recipe not appearing in an American cookbook until 1815. By 1909 it was a different story, as the wonderfully no-nonsense Up-To-Date Sandwich Book featured here can attest to, a popularity no doubt linked to what made the food form soar amongst the working classes of the British industrial revolution — it was fast, portable, and cheap. As the subtitle betrays, no less than four hundred different sandwiches are detailed in the book. Enjoy!


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Potts’s Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (1845)

Oct 20, 2016

This is a nineteenth-century reprint, with additional introduction by James Crossley, of Thomas Potts' The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, first published in 1613. Potts' text, commissioned by the court at the time, is an account of a series of English witch trials that took place on 18th and 19th August 1612, commonly known as the Lancashire witch trials. Of the twenty women and men accused of consorting with the dark side — including the Pendle witches and the Samlesbury witches — eleven were found guilty and hanged (with one dying in jail), another was sentenced to stand in the pillory, and the rest were let go.
The accusations of witchery all began in mid-March of that year when a pedlar from Halifax named John Law had a frightening encounter with a poor young woman, Alizon Device, in a field near Colne. He refused her request for pins and there was a brief argument during which he was seized by a fit that left him with "his head … drawn awry, his eyes and face deformed, his speech not well to be understood; his thighs and legs stark lame." We can now recognize this as a stroke, perhaps triggered by the stressful encounter. Alizon Device was sent for and surprised all by confessing to the bewitching of John Law and then begged for forgiveness.


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The Splash of a Drop (1895)

Oct 6, 2016

The transcript of a “Discourse” given at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1894, this short text is a delightful study of the physics and aesthetics of splashing drops — phenomena familiar to “any drinker of afternoon tea”. Crediting a “school-boy at Rugby” with making the initial observation “some twenty years ago”, A. M. Worthington describes how fallen drops of mercury, alcohol, and water may appear to be “lying unbroken” but have actually taken part in “violent exercise”, the traces of which can be glimpsed on opaque glass. Examining these traces, which he calls “footprints of the dance”, leads the scientist to wonderfully minute ends:
The splash of a drop is a transaction which is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, and it may seem to some that a man who proposes to discourse on the matter for an hour must have lost all sense of proportion. If that opinion exists, I hope this evening to be able to remove it, and to convince you that we have to deal with an exquisitely regulated phenomenon, and one which very happily illustrates some of the fundamental properties of fluids.
The main draw of the book is undoubtedly the mesmerizing series of images — many of which are engravings of photographs — depicting drops at different stages of dissolution. For this, Worthington thanks “the inventors of the sensitive plates”, which have afforded him and his collaborator R. S. Cole “the first really detailed objective views that have been obtained with anything approaching so short an exposure”. For those who are technologically unequipped, he details a lensless process for capturing drops. Before turning to photography, Worthington made use of physiological afterimages. He fabricated a short-duration flashing device and worked in darkness, allowing him to essentially “freeze” the liquid “long enough on the eye for the observer to be able to attend to it”. He would repeat this process until the drawing was complete, and then begin another illustration some .001 seconds later in the drop’s descent.
Along with its captivating images, The Splash of a Drop is also notable for illuminating, descriptive prose. During his research, which he calls a “Natural History of Splashes”, Worthington discovers: that drops have dynamic bodies, which morph into a “beautiful beaded annular edge” during collision; how a drop of milk “rides triumphant on the top of the emergent column”; and that this column then “falls back into the middle of a circle of satellites”. These spouting eruptions are now called “Worthington jets” in their researcher’s honor.
The Splash of a Drop ends with Worthington not trusting his own eyes. Looking over old drawings of drops, he finds discrepancies with his photographs, which he explains as the imagination’s desire for perfection: “the mind of the observer is filled with an ideal splash—an “Auto-Splash”—whose perfection may never be actually realized.” Absolute darkness, he writes, “and other conditions necessary for photography are not very favourable for direct vision.”
R. S. Cole’s elaboration of the photographic process, in an 1894 letter to Nature — which picks up where Worthington left off, “through want of time”, during his discourse at the Royal Institution — is available on archive.org.


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Illustrations from a Descriptive Iconography of Cacti (1841)

Sep 20, 2016

Illustrations of cacti featured in Iconographie descriptive des cactées, ou, Essais systématiques et raisonnés sur l'histoire naturelle, la classification et la culture des plantes de cette famille by French botanist Charles Lemaire. Devoting pretty much his whole career to the study of Cactaceae, Lemaire was also editor of the botanical journals L'Horticulteur Universel and Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe. Although considered an authority Lemaire lived in semi-poverty for most of his life, never publishing a major work on Cactaceae and never managing to attract the attention of a wealthy sponsor. After his death in 1871, Edouard Andre, his successor as editor of L'Illustration Horticole, said that "Posterity will esteem M. Lemaire more highly than did his contemporaries".


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The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky (1877)

Sep 15, 2016

Originally published in 1876, this book is remarkable not only for being the first major work in contemporary chromotherapy, but also for its unique appearance. True to the ideas held within — that blue light is bearer of unique and special properties — the book is entirely printed with blue ink on blue paper. Its author, a retired US Civil War general named Augustus James Pleasonton, proposed that isolating blue wavelengths from the sun could benefit the growth of both flora and fauna, and also help to eradicate disease in humans. The science was shaky at best. Believing that plants flourished in springtime because of the increased blueness of the sky, he patented special greenhouses with blue filters on the glass which he claimed led to particularly abundant grape harvests. From grapes he moved on to pigs and cows, also claiming a vast improvement in growth. Although his ideas were not taken seriously by the scientific establishment it did lead to what became know as the "Blue-glass Craze". Farmers bought the glass by the truck loads, people put it in their spectacles, and baby incubators were clad in the stuff. Echoing similar sentiments about viral trends we find today, of the new fad an exasperated Boston Globe wrote: "Indeed we hope the epidemic will be violent and proportionally short. It is amusing to see people making fools of themselves, but it soon grows wearisome." The newspaper's wishes came largely true as the craze didn't last for more than a couple of years, though it did give birth to the niche field of "chromotherapy". It also gave birth to similar publications, the following year Seth Pancoast bringing out his Blue and Red Light, or, Light and its Rays as Medicine (1877), which echoed Pleasonton's radical design, the pages of blue printed words enclosed within a red border (see below).


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Silent Night (1912)

Sep 8, 2016

Rendition of the Christmas favourite, by Elizabeth Spencer, Harry Anthony and James F. Harrison. Towards the end it seems as though they may be singing in another language apart from English, though its not quite clear which (that or they seem to have forgotten the words!).


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Catalogue from Belcher Mosaic Glass Co. (1886)

Apr 19, 2016

Stained glass artist Henry Belcher and his New York based company produced some glorious work, as shown in this 1886 catalogue offering a small taster of their output. The "mosaic" refers to the unique process which Belcher developed and for which he filed more than 20 patents. Instead of the traditional grouting approach, in which individual pieces would be attached together, Belcher's method involved a kind of mould. He'd first lay the various pieces of glass out in a design (hence the "mosaic" aspect), and then sandwich it between two layers of asbestos (picking up the design with a gummed first piece and then closing it with a second). Having earlier made sure there was a gap between each piece of the design, he'd then pour molten lead into the make-shift mould, thus binding the various fragments of the design together. The innovative approach allowed him to create quite stunningly detailed designs. "The designs fell into several categories", writes Barbara Krueger "those with a floral theme; those for use in a transom with a house number; those with neoclassic elements popular in the late 19th century; and several pictorial scenes (fish swimming, flying bats and several with the human figure)." We picked out some highlights below.


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Shakespeare in Art

Apr 20, 2016

To celebrate the 400th anniversary since the passing of "The Bard" (on 23rd April 1616), we put together some of our favourite images to which his plays have given rise. The artists include William Blake, Henry Fuseli, George Cruikshank, Robert Smirke, and Franz Marc. Enjoy!


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The Legs of the Opera (ca. 1862)

May 24, 2016

An unusual creation from the studio of André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, the French photographer best known for inventing the hugely popular "carte de visite". In this wonderful example, titled "Les Jambes de l'Opera", Disdéri has created a collage composed entirely of legs belonging to opera (and ballet) stars. Although his patent on the "carte de visite" initially made him extremely wealthy, Disdéri ended up dying a penniless man. His system of reproducing photographs was itself so easy to reproduce that photographers soon did so without Disdéri benefiting, and the format was replaced in the late 60s by the larger cabinet card format.


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New Elucidations of Thomson’s Seasons (1822)

Apr 27, 2016

"The Seasons" is a series of four poems written by the Scotsman James Thomson, the first part, Winter, appearing in 1726, and the last, Autumn, in 1730. The poem proved influential across the arts, inspiring musical compositions by both John Christopher Smith and Joseph Haydn, as well as visually in works by Thomas Gainsborough and J. M. W. Turner. One of the lesser known artworks to spring from Thomson's cycle is this light-hearted effort from the pen of Henry James Pidding, a London-based artist specialising in humorous works. For this offering he has taken literal direction from a Shakespeare quote ("suit the action to the word, the word to the action", from Hamlet), and illustrated, portion by portion, a celebrated passage from Thomson's poem Spring, doing his best to twist Thomson's intended meaning whenever he can.
Delightful Task! to rear the tender Thought,To teach the young Idea how to shoot,To pour the fresh Instruction o'er the Mind,To breathe th' enlivening spirit, and to fixThe generous Purpose in the glowing Breast.
Much of the humour lies in these double meanings, and how they lead often to the pairing of mundane happenings such as cleaning streets with Thomson's bombastic sentiment. There is also a certain darkness to many of the scenes, all exaggerated by the skeleton protagonists who are symbolically at odds to the themes of growth and inspiration to which the lines are dedicated.


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I Am The Edison Phonograph (1906)

May 20, 2016

This somewhat unnerving recording would have been heard at most Edison phonograph dealers in the early part of the twentieth century — creating, as it were, a talking machine which advertised itself.


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A Traveler from Altruria (1894)

Jul 26, 2016

Originally published in instalments in Cosmopolitan, this piece of utopian fiction by William Dean Howells delivers a vision of a "one-class" socialist utopia while at once offering a biting critique of unfettered capitalism. The story centres around a visit to America of Mr Homos, a citizen of a mysterious island called Altruria, which is home to a one-class socialist Christian society, with no monetary system and no concept of the rich and poor. In the course of Mr Homos' visit he is appalled by what he sees occurring in late-19th-century America, a society which he likens to his country's own before "Evolution". He is clearly confused by the class system, continuously embarrassing his hosts — carrying his own luggage, bowing to waitresses, and other such acts — and finds certain activities simply bizarre, for example exercise for its own sake:
To us, exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should — if you will excuse my saying so — look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.
In Altruria, all people are guaranteed a share of the national product on the condition they work at least three hours a day. In 1894, the year in which Howells' story was published, the fiction attempted to become reality when a Unitarian minister Edward Biron Payne — inspired by the Christian socialist principles espoused by Howells' book — founded "Altruria", a community in Sonoma County, California, which he set up with thirty of his followers. A hotel was started, and orchards provided fruit sold to a shop in Berkeley owned by Job Harriman (who himself set up the commune of Llano del Rio in 1913). Unfortunately, "Altruria" ran into unsurmountable financial troubles and it was abandoned in 1896. Howells would go on though, eventually creating an Altrurian trilogy, with the publication of Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).


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To New Horizons (1940)

Jul 14, 2016

Promotional film from General Motors created to champion their "Highways and Horizons" exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. The film presents a vision of the future, namely of 1960 seen through the eyes of those living in 1940, and imagines the world of tomorrow which the narrator describes as "A greater world, a better world, a world which always will grow forward". The 1939-40 New York World's Fair was the first to focus on the future and the General Motors's Futurama exhibit consisted of a ride carrying 552 people at a time and showing a diorama designed by Norman Bel Geddes wherein the roads and city planning of the future include elevated pedestrian walkways as well as highways with 7 lanes for cars traveling at different speeds. The exhibit was a hit and easily became the most popular event among the visitors as the promise of a brighter future was welcomed by the Americans who had experienced the Great Depression. Of course, the next five years — which saw war rage across the world on an unprecedented scale — would bring anything but this utopian vision.


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Max Brückner’s Collection of Polyhedral Models (1900)

Jun 21, 2016

Max Brückner (1860–1934) was a German geometer, known for his collection of stellated and uniform polyhedra, which he documented in his 1900 book Vielecke und Vielflache: Theorie und Geschichte (Polygons and Polyhedra: Theory and History). Included in the influential study was a compound of three octahedra, made famous by M. C. Escher's 1948 print Stars, which depicts the shape floating through space in the form of a cage with two chameleons inside it.


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The Map That Changed the Middle East (1916)

May 16, 2016

The Sykes–Picot Agreement map: the map that changed the Middle East. It was an enclosure in the French ambassador Paul Cambon's letter to Sir Edward Grey, dated 9th May 1916. Seven days later the two would sign the Sykes–Picot Agreement, a secret agreement between the the UK and France outlining, according to the lines on the map, how they would carve up the Middle East should the Ottoman Empire be defeated in the First World War. The Ottomans were indeed defeated two years later and the rest, as they say, is history: a complicated, sad, and very bloody history. Learn more about the agreement, the map, and their consequences in David Fromkin's highly recommended A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989). You can also check out the fairly thorough Wikipedia entry here.


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The Magic Roses (1906)

Jun 2, 2016

A film by the pioneering Spanish film director and cinematographer Segundo Chomón. With his innovative use of early splice-based tricks and a penchant for optical illusions he is often compared to the slightly earlier Georges Méliès, and indeed has been dubbed "The Spanish Méliès" by some. Though the similarities are clear, Chomón departs from Méliès in his variety of subjects and his use of animation, an art form he played a key role in developing. In this beautifully coloured short (using Pochoir, a type of stencil process), originally titled Les Roses Magique, a bouquet of roses gives birth to a whole unexpected world, played out against a wonderful floral backdrop.


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Emanuel Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams and Spiritual Experiences in the Year 1744 (1918)

May 11, 2016

Lesser known among the many works of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, religious teacher and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is his private Drömbok (variously translated into English as Journal of Dreams or Dream Diary). Attracting less attention than his other journals, from later years, this "octavo pocket book, (6.5 by 4 inches), bound in parchment and containing 104 written pages" was lost for many years, only found in 1849 in the library of an apparent "enemy" of Swedenborg's, R. Scheringson, professor and lector in the city of Westeras.  Its contents cover a period from July 1743 until October 1744, a time of crisis for Swedenborg, transitioning as he was from life as a scientist and mining engineer to one as a "revelator" and seer. It begins as a simple travel diary, describing his leaving Sweden, crossing the Baltic to Stralsund and then journeying through Hamburg and Bremen to the Netherlands. After some undated fragments it resumes at the end of March 1744. A week or so later during Easter weekend, in what is probably the most significant part of the Journal, Swedenborg describes in detail a vision of Christ he had while staying in Delft. Among the heavenly visions come other scenes both mundane and fantastical: a cast of various dogs, Kings, an executioner with his heads, dragons, a talking ox, and an abstract apparition of an oblong globe. There are also many women and, somewhat controversially, several dreams that are erotic in content.
In one vivid dream, no. 171, Swedenborg finds himself in bed with a woman. She touches his penis with her hand and he has an erection, bigger than he has ever had. He penetrates her, reflecting that a child must come of this, and writes that he got off en merveille. (He uses the French expression in the original.) In a remarkable dream (no. 120) he is lying with a woman who was not beautiful but who pleased him. He touched her vagina and discovered that it had a set of teeth. Suddenly this woman assumes the form of a man, the politician Johan Archenholtz, a friend and ally of Swedenborg’s. The image of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) appears again in no. 261 where he sees in a vision a fiercely burning coal fire that represents the "fire of love". Then he is with a woman whom he wants to penetrate, but the teeth prevent him entering her.
In R. L. Tafel's early English translation this erotic material was omitted, and it wasn’t until C.Th. Odhner’s translation published in 1918 (featured above), that the offending passages were reinstated, albeit in the guise of Latin.
Learn more about his dream diary, and the saucy visions within, in our essay by Richard Lines here.


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The Steps of Life

May 31, 2016

The idea of a human's life being divisible into distinct stages has been around for millennia, a recurring theme in the literature and art running through all historical periods and places. The early Greeks were particularly fond of the idea, the earliest reference being from lawmaker, and poet Solon (ca. 600 BC), who had ten stages of seven years each. Hippocrates (ca. 450 BC) had seven stages, while Aristotle (ca. 350 BC) spoke of three: youth, prime of life, and old age. The idea is, however, perhaps made most famous by William Shakespeare who has Jacques in As You Like It speak some of The Bard's most famous lines:
All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.Then, the whining school-boy with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like a snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then, a soldier,Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon’s mouth. And then, the justice,In fair round belly, with a good capon lin’d,With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws, and modern instances,And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
In addition to literature, the idea of life's divisible course has been the fount for some wonderful imagery, most depicting the different ages as ascending then descending a series of steps: what in the German tradition became known as "Lebenstreppe" or "Stufenalter" (which can be traced back to Jörg Breu's 15th-century effort). As perhaps is to be expected, given the inevitable end point, the scythe-wielding figure of death is to be found lurking in most images ("under the stairs", as it were). Come the 19th century the format was also used in a number of satires: from the progress of a drunkard to the toils of the political life. In rough chronological order, we present a selection of highlights below, from the 14th to the early 20th century.


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Celestial Phenomenon Over Nuremberg, April 14th, 1561

Apr 14, 2016

As the sun rose on April 14, 1561, over the German city of Nuremberg, the residents saw what they described as some kind of aerial battle take place in its glare — complete with the erratic dance of orbs, crosses, cylinders, and the appearance of a large and mysterious black arrow-shaped object — all followed by a crash-landing somewhere beyond the city limits. Later that month, local artist Hans Glaser produced a broadsheet (pictured above) offering a woodcut engraving of the scene, and a detailed description of what was witnessed. The text reads:
In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes. These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen. By Hanns Glaser, letter-painter of Nurnberg.
Interpreted religiously at the time, more recently some have considered the event an early sighting of extraterrestrial beings — the witnessing of some kind of alien spaceship battle occurring in the Bavarian skies. Although one, perhaps, shouldn't entirely rule out such a far-fetched interpretation, it is more likely that what the good people of Nuremberg witnessed that morning, and subsequently elaborated upon, was a natural meteorological phenomenon (possibly "sundogs", or to give them their scientific term, "parhelia"?). Another interesting idea relates to the fact that a year earlier Vannoccio Biringuccio published De La Pirotechnia, Europe's first book on metallurgy which  contained several chapters on the preparation and use of rockets in warfare and festivals. Could this Italian book have made its way to the hands of a Nuremberg resident keen to try out the firework recipes it included?
This mysterious event in Nuremberg, and its depiction in Glaser's broadsheet, would go largely unmentioned until the twentieth century, when it appeared in Carl Jung's 1958 work Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
For more on sixteenth-century broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events see our post here.


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Raja Harishchandra (1913)

May 3, 2016

Directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke, the "father of Indian Cinema", this 40-minute-long silent film is the very first full-length Indian feature — the beginning of Bollywood. The narrative of the film is based on the eponymous legend recounted in the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The story centres around the hero Harishchandra, a noble king, who, to honour his promise to the sage Vishwamitra, sacrifices his kingdom, his wife, and eventually also his children. By the end, however, having pleased the Gods with his actions, Harishchandra's former glory is restored.
Phalke was apparently inspired to make films after watching the French film The Life of Christ (1902), twice in one day. He quit his job at a printing press and went to London to learn the technical ins and outs of making a film. Returning to India, he pledged in his life-assurance policies and his wife sold her jewellery to raise the capital needed. Struggling to find women willing to act in the film, Phalke had to instead cast men in the female roles, including Anna Salunke as Harishchandra's wife. Salunke — who worked in a restaurant as a cook before Phalke gave him his role in Raja Harishchandra — would later play both Rama and Sita in Phalke's 1917 film Lanka Dahan and become the most well known actor/actress of his time.
Unfortunately, Raja Harishchandra only exists now in fragments (1475 feet of it), which you can see above, with both Hindi and English intertitles.


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Hypnotism Posters (ca. 1900)

May 10, 2016

A set of amusing turn-of-the-century hypnotism posters showing hypnotised people up to various strange shenanigans: a group of men wield brooms and umbrellas as though musical instruments; women ride men like horses; and (remembering that it is more than a century ago) a man dresses in women's clothes, and two men canoodle. With its roots in "mesmerism", the phenomena of hypnotism began to gain momentum with the work of Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795–1860), an early pioneer of the practice, paving the way for it to hit the mainstream toward the end of the nineteenth century. There is not much information available about these five images below, only that they were the product of The Donaldson Lithographing Co. based in Newport, Kentucky and seem to be from around 1900.


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My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum (1879)

Jul 13, 2016

In February 1875, the barrister and author Herman Charles Merivale (1839-1906) was committed to Ticehurst in Sussex, a private lunatic asylum owned and run by the Newington family since 1792. Having suffered from what would nowadays be deemed as depression, Merivale spent almost seven months at Ticehurst where his mental state, intake of food, as well as his sleeping habits were recorded in a casebook. After initially being released in September 1875, he returned to the asylum within a year on account of suicidal tendencies and was later transferred out of the hospital in 1877 although his condition had not improved. In his book, published in 1879 under the pseudonym of "A Sane Patient", Merivale tells of his first night:
I was therefore ‘removed,’ half-dying, in a state of semi-consciousness, I can scarcely remember how, to the castellated mansion mentioned in my first chapter. The wrong should have been impossible, of course; but it is possible, and it is law. My liberty, and my very existence as an individual being, had been signed away behind my back. In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel. Left alone in a big room on the first evening, I was puzzled by the entrance of a wild-looking man, who described figures in the air with his hand, to an accompaniment of gibber, ate a pudding with his fingers at the other end of a long table, and retired. My nerve was shaken to its weakest, remember; and I was alone with him! It was not an hotel. It was a lunatic asylum.
Later he speaks of how, although the food and recreational activities offered at the asylum could not be faulted, he knew that he was in the wrong place.
All this bears so fair an outside that it seems difficult to quarrel with it. Yet the life that it concealed was inconceivably terrible. My head was full of the weakest, the most varying, the most wandering fancies — the fancies of sheer and long-continued exhaustion. These parties, games, entertainments, meals, without a friend's face near me, without hope, wish, or volition; with the shouts and cries of the really violent to wake me sometimes at night; with every form of personal affliction to haunt and mock and yet companion me by day; with poor fellows playing all sorts of strange antics round me, herded together anyhow or nohow, with or without private rooms of their own — more, I'm afraid, in proportion as their friends could or would pay for them or not [...], with Death in the house every now and then, falling suddenly and terribly on one of these unhappy outcasts from some unsuspected malady within, which they could not explain, spoken of in whispers, and hushed up and forgotten as soon as might be, [...] the story makes me shrink in the telling, and almost regret that I have undertaken to tell it.
My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum is one of many similar tales (e.g. Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop's A Secret Institution, 1890) which echoed and fed the fear rife in Victorian Britain of being falsely confined in such private asylums. Merivale's pamphlet perhaps stands out from others, however, in its literary stature, coming from the pen of an author who counted amongst his friends  William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and others.


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The Difficulty of Ruling over a Diverse Nation (1578)

Jun 9, 2016

16th-century Dutch engraving depicting a fantastical animal with the heads of various other animals sprouting from its body: an allegory for the difficulty of ruling over a diverse nation.  In the background, watching on, can be seen a small mob or leaders, both secular and religious. This work by Antwerp-based artist Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, with its image of a confused and troubled body politic, is perhaps just as relevant now as it was then.


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The Singerie: Monkeys acting as Humans in Art

Jul 19, 2016

Singerie — from the French for "Monkey Trick" — is a genre of art in which monkeys are depicted apeing human behaviour. Although the practise can be traced as far back as Ancient Egypt, it wasn't until the 16th century that the idea really took off and emerged as a distinct genre. Some of its most famous champions include the Flemish engraver Pieter van der Borcht (whose 1575 series of singerie prints were widely disseminated), Jan Brueghel the Elder, and the the two Teniers brothers, David Teniers the Younger and his younger brother Abraham Teniers. Into the 18th century the genre saw great popularity in France, particularly in the guise of the “singe peintre” (monkey painter), which offered up a perfect parody of the art world’s pomposity. With monkeys, along with apes, being our closest cognates in the animal world, they proved the perfect medium for the satirising of society, which so often thinks itself “above” the animal kingdom. Singeries have proved popular all the way into the 21st century, notably in the fantastic work of the American artist Walton Ford.


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A Vision of Isolating Technology from 1906

Jul 27, 2016

Replace these "wireless telegraphs" with smartphones, update the dress a little, and this vision from a 1906 issue of Punch magazine could easily be for 110 years in the future. Part of a series of "forecasts" for the year to come, the caption reads: “These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady receives an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results.” It's a reminder that the idea of technology leading to a breakdown in "authentic" human interaction is a worry not solely limited to our age.
Punch seemed to have a knack for uncanny predictions of distant technologies to come. See for example this vision of the Skype-like "Telephonoscope" from 1879.


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Fables for the Frivolous (1899)

Jun 8, 2016

One of the earliest works by the American parodist Guy Wetmore Carryl, this collection of fables are adapted from Jean de La Fontaine's Aesop-style originals from more than 200 years earlier. Carryl's light-hearted re-tellings are rendered in verse, each ending without fail with a moral and a (normally dubious) pun. This particular edition benefits also from a series of illustrations by the wonderful Peter Newell. As well as this take off of Fontaine, Carryl also leant his parodying pen to Grimm's Fairy Tales, including “How Little Red Riding Hood Came To Be Eaten” and “How Fair Cinderella Disposed of Her Shoe”.


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Album of Seaweed Pictures (1848)

Jun 14, 2016

The art of arranging marine algae into designs, bouquets, and even sometimes intricate little scenes, was surprisingly popular in the nineteenth century. The particularly fine examples featured here, using doilies as frames, are from an album presented to Augustus Graham, a member of the first board of directors of the Brooklyn Apprentice's Library, later to become the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and the Brooklyn Museum. Graham also served as the first president of the Institute of Arts and Sciences between 1840-1851 and the album was given to him as a thank you in recognition of his work. Made by a woman named Eliza A. Jordson, it contains – apart from the specimens of seaweed – an essay on the method of transferring the algae to paper, as well as a poem on the "flowers of the sea".

Ah! call us not weeds —
We are flowers of the sea
For lovely and bright
And gay tinted are we —

We are quite independent
Of culture and showers
Then call us not weeds
We are oceans's gay flowers.

Variations on the poem crop up time and again in other examples of seaweed pictures, and it is even mentioned in Jane Austen's unfinished 1817 novel Sandition when a seaweed picture is spied through the window of a shop. Its provenance is not entirely clear, though sources seem to imply it is possibly the work of E. L. Aveline.


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Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing

Jun 28, 2016

Images from an illustrated version of a 13th-century Arabic treatise by Zakariya al-Qazwini titled ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing). The text is probably the best known example of ‘ajā’ib or ‘jā’ib al-makhlūqāt literature, a genre of classical Islamic literature that was concerned with "mirabilia": cosmographical and geographical topics that challenged understanding. Al-Qazwini's treatise explored an eclectic mix of topics, from humans and their anatomy to strange mythical creatures; from plants and animals to constellations of stars and zodiacal signs. The treatise was extremely popular and was frequently illustrated over the centuries into both Persian and Turkish. The images featured here are from an exquisitely illustrated Persian translation, thought to hail from 17th-century Mughal India. For more info see the note on the US National Library of Medicine website.


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Guess Me (1879)

Jun 22, 2016

Illustrated by George Cruikshank among others, this example of good old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment offers a collection of enigmas, conundrums, acrostics, "decapitations", and a series of incredibly tricky rebuses. The preface explains that an enigma can have many solutions whereas a conundrum only has one, and that "The essence of a good conundrum is to be found in its answer, which should be itself something of a pun, a puzzle, or an epigram, an inversion of the regular and ordinary meaning of the word." Some of the 631 conundrums included in the book:
Why is a clock always bashful? – Because its hands are ever before its face.Why are persons fatigued, like a wheel? – Because they are tired.Why are good resolutions like fainting ladies? – They want carrying out.When is a kiss like rumour? – When it goes from mouth to mouth.
Perhaps the highlight of the book are the rebuses — called here "hieroglyphics" — the solving of which vary from difficult to near on impossible. Some highlights below.


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Comparative Physiognomy: or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals (1852)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 26, 2016

Typhoon (1902) by Joseph Conrad opens with a simultaneous description of Captain MacWhirr’s face and character: he “had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled.” A particularly popular idea in the nineteenth century, physiognomy — the belief that one could equate facial characteristics with moral and intellectual character — belonged to a cluster of sciences all predicated on an almost premodern notion: that the qualities and properties of people and objects can be divined through appearance. Phrenology, craniometry, chiromancy (palm reading), dactylography (the study of fingerprints), and graphology shared a central anthropometric tenet: “that the unseen state of a person’s soul makes itself manifest through their physical body in the form of readable signatures.”
A classic of the genre, Comparative Physiognomy by U.S. physician James W. Redfield carried forward the work of Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), often credited as the father of physiognomy, who, following Aristotle, believed that asinine humans literally resembled asses — “Long ears are a sign that their possessor is extremely foppish, both in language and action” — and that the difference between frogs and gods was a matter of countenance. While, according to Brian Bantum, Lavater’s work “never explicitly invok[ed] racial nomenclature”, it nevertheless articulated “a theological vision of an ideal Christian body, a saint, as a white male body”. What was implicit for Lavater becomes explicit in Redfield’s Comparative Physiognomy, a book informed by the intersection of evolutionary theory, eugenics, and the emergence of “racial anthropology” in the nineteenth century, which sought to hierarchize human beings through physical appearance.
As its title implies, the book is concerned with comparing animals and human faces, clustered by nation and ethnic groups. A quick glance at the content page gives a sense of the endeavor. The specific pairings tell their own story of the racist inclinations simmering below the surface, but also consign the project to an absurd realm of cultural constructivism from the get-go. Redfield’s logic for comparing Turks to turkeys turns on a homonymic coincidence in English absent from the etymology of “Turk”. Nevertheless, the physiognomist claims that the “turkey is too much like the Turk (who seems to be entirely unconscious of the position in which we have placed him)”. The “we” here is telling. The Germans, "Yankees", and British land a trio of animals associated with strength: lions, bears, and bulls respectively. Others are “placed” by Redfield into unfortunate comparisons with the lesser qualities mice, fish, and camels. Reading Comparative Physiognomy, it quickly becomes apparent why this “science” and its anthropometric cousins found European and American champions during the New Imperial era. It’s easier to justify economic extraction and civilizing missions when you are dealing with beasts.

author: Hunter Dukes


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Paintings in Proust (Vol. 1, Swann’s Way)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 14, 2013

November 14th, 2013, marked 100 years since Marcel Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, his masterwork written from 1909 to 1922, largely at night in the silence of a cork-lined room. Throughout the seven volume long searching tour through his memories - in his attempts to describe scenes and emotions, to help elucidate a point, sharpen an image, or as simply a subject in itself - Proust would time and again turn to the visual arts. As Proust says in the novel, “It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.” He mentions more than a hundred painters from the 14th through the 20th century making, as the artist Eric Karpeles points out, “one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature.” As a celebration of the centennial we have put together a few highlights of Proust's many mentions of artworks to be found in the first volume, Swann's Way, in which the narrator recounts his experiences growing up, participating in society, falling in love, and learning about art. The translations are from C.K. Scott Moncrieff's English translation (available here on project Gutenberg, in the public domain). We are indebted also to the excellent Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, for helping us greatly in identifying the various mentions of artworks - a highly recommended book.
Giotto's Charity, Envy and Justice
In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant, without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible, that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level above.
The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and is represented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like a child's who is filling a balloon with his breath, and that Envy, and we ourselves for that matter, when we look at her, since all her attention and ours are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no time, almost, to spare for envious thoughts.
Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing in our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to their meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
Charles Gleyre's Lost Illusions
Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of art were very different—at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies—from those in which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire.
Pieter de Hooch's Interiors
He would enter the drawing-room; and there, while Mme. Verdurin, pointing to the roses which he had sent her that morning, said: "I am furious with you!" and sent him to the place kept for him, by the side of Odette, the pianist would play to them—for their two selves, and for no one else—that little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love. He began, always, with a sustained tremolo from the violin part, which, for several bars, was unaccompanied, and filled all the foreground; until suddenly it seemed to be drawn aside, and—just as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch, where the subject is set back a long way through the narrow framework of a half-opened door—infinitely remote, in colour quite different, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light, the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world.
Sandro Boticelli's Trial of Moses
He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered her more precious in his sight. Swann reproached himself with his failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own system of aesthetic. He told himself that, in choosing the thought of Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not, as he had until then supposed, falling back, merely, upon an expedient of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him (gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles; while the kiss, the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as exquisite as they would be supernatural.
And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a collector.
On his study table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman, he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated himself on finding assembled in the person of one whom he might, ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh and blood, of Jethro's Daughter, became a desire which more than compensated, thenceforward, for that with which Odette's physical charms had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart....
Or else she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli's 'Life of Moses,' he would place it there, giving to Odette's neck the necessary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sixtine, the idea that she was, none the less, in the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed and won, the idea of her material existence, of her being alive, would sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws that parted as though to devour her, he would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.
Giotto's Panels
When my father had decided, one year, that we should go for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be, in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the more—and because one cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space—like some of Giotto's paintings themselves which shew us at two separate moments the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his bed, there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, aslant, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the same attraction that they have in the works of the Primitives), I moved swiftly—so as to arrive, as soon as might be, at the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of Chianti—across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice," I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring.
Nicolas Poussin's Spring, or the Earthly Paradise
The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home,—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods; casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess, with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, of the colour of heliotrope, spread over the lawn like a carpet on which I could not tire of treading to and fro with lingering feet, nostalgic and profane, while Françoise shouted: "Come on, button up your coat, look, and let's get away!" and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

author: Adam Green


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Phenomena of Materialisation (1923)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 31, 2013

This remarkable book by German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing focuses on a series of séances, witnessed between the years 1909 and 1913, involving the French medium Eva Carrière (or Eva C). Born Marthe Béraud, Carrière changed her name in 1909 to begin her career afresh after a series of seances she held in 1905 were exposed as a fraud. Her psychic performances as Eva C gained the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who believed she was genuine, and also Harry Houdini, who was not so convinced. Another researcher who became interested in her case was Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. A series of tests he devised between the years 1909 and 1913 convinced him that Eva C was the real deal and in 1913 he published his Phenomena of Materialisation detailing the sessions and the reasons for his belief.
It has been noted that these sessions with Schrenck-Notzing verged on the pornographic. Carrière's assistant (and reported lover) Juliette Bisson would, during the course of the séance sittings with Schrenck-Notzing, introduce her finger into Carrière's vagina to ensure no "ectoplasm" had been put there beforehand. This would be followed by Carrière stripping nude at the end and demanding another full-on gynaecological exam. Whether the audience members were obliging is up for debate, but reports that Carrière would run around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience suggests perhaps so. One can imagine that this deliberate eroticisation of the male audience might go some way to explaining the ease with which these "investigators" believed the psychic reality of the seances. A decision of fraud on their part would distance their involvement somewhat from the special and heightened context of the séances and so cast their complicity in, or at the least witnessing of, sexual activities in the sober (and more judgemental) cold light of day.
The spiritualist debunker Harry Price wrote that the photographs taken by Schrenk-Notzing, rather than proving the reality of Carrière's mediumship, in fact did just the opposite. In 1920, Carrière was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in London. An analysis of her ectoplasm revealed it to be made of chewed paper and the ghostly faces to be cut from the French magazine Le Miroir. Back issues of the magazine matched some of Carrière's ectoplasm faces, including Woodrow Wilson, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, and the French president Raymond Poincaré. This is something Schrenk-Notzing tries to address in his book, but without much success. A 1913 newspaper article explained how
Miss Eva prepared the heads before every séance, and endeavoured to make them unrecognizable. A clean-shaven face was decorated with a beard. Grey hairs became black curls, a broad forehead was made into a narrow one. But, in spite of all her endeavours, she could not obliterate certain characteristic lines."


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An Account of a Chinese Cabinet (1753)

Oct 23, 2013

An account by Sir Hans Sloane detailing the contents of a Chinese cabinet (which includes a "Sea Horse Tooth") procured by a Mr Buckley during travels in China. A physician by trade Sloane was also an avid collector of natural curiosities and upon his death, bequeathed the entirety of his collection to the nation and, together with George II's royal library, it was opened to the public as the British Museum in 1759. A note at the end of this account, which appears in the January 1753 accounts of the Royal Society (the same month that Sloane would pass away), praises the collecting of Mr Buckley:
It were to be wished other travellers into Foreign parts would make such enquiries (as Mr Buckly [sic] who sent these to the Royal Society has done) into the Instruments and Materials made use of in the places where they come, that are any manner of way for the Benefit or innocent delight of Mankind, that we may content our selves with our own Inventions, where we go beyond them, and imitate theirs wherein they go beyond ours.


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Frederick Whitney’s Blackboard Sketching (1909)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 17, 2013

In his brief introduction to Frederick Whitney’s Blackboard Sketching, the American painter and educator Walter Sargent writes that “to draw easily and well on the blackboard is a power which every teacher of children covets. Such drawing is a language which never fails to hold attention and awaken delighted interest”. Aimed at educators looking to improve their lesson plans, these drawings may capture the attention of young students, but Whitney’s illustrative plates for Blackboard Sketching are also capable of awakening a childhood wonder in their adult viewer. Using simple strokes — “a straight mark with the side of the chalk”; “a quick back-and-forth movement”; “a graded stroke from side to side” — he summons lifelike oyster shells, Shakespearean castles, and cozy Christmas hearths. Out of dusty chalk, dreamlike scenes emerge. And while the natural imagery feels timeless, other details ground this carbonate imagination in a particular romantic vision of the United States at the century’s turn. There are log cabins of homesteaders, square-rigged ships on the high seas, wigwams nested in dark groves, and, in the final and most bizarre image of the book, a cut-out photograph of a child dressed in cotton batting, posed in front of a chalk backdrop of igloos and icebergs. Using this same technique, Whitney claims, “A Japanese Day, An Indian Entertainment, A Soldiers’ Camp Ground, A Lumber Camp, and many others, are easily arranged.”
The Director of Art at the State Normal School in Salem, Massachusetts (now Salem State University), Charles Frederick Whitney (1858–1949) provided art instruction to a student body composed of mostly working-class women. He lectured on “The furnishing of the simple home” and “The symbolism of color”, and taught courses on weaving, drawing, and handwork. Whitney is remembered by his 1920 pupils as having the “apparent hobby” of “looking distinguished” and for frequently uttering the phrase: “Bully, girls, very harmonious”. He seems to have appealed to harmony across his career: seven years later, students asked in their yearbook, “What would happen if Mr. Whitney wasn’t dressed harmoniously?”, and recounted visiting their art teacher’s “enchanting home”, where his “rich oriental rugs, the delicate hangings, the deep cushions, and the neutral lamp shades” created “a complimentary harmony”. As an artist, he made water-color sketches of natural landscapes, and went on to publish another book, Indian Designs and Symbols (1925). Upon retirement, Whitney was memorialized through a plaque presented by the Class of 1928, remembering their instructor as a “Teacher . . . Artist . . . Friend”.


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The Sketchbooks of Jacques-Louis David

Oct 22, 2013

Selections from "Album 11", a sketchbook belonging to the French neoclassical painter and revolutionary Jacques-Louis David. The sketches are from his student years in Rome in the 1770s, a time in which he became obsessed with the ancient and Renaissance art to be found in the city. During this period he made well over 1000 "Roman sketches" and relied on them as a visual resource throughout his career. Once returned to Paris, David dismantled his sketchbooks and reorganised the leaves into albums according to type, numbering 12 in total. This 11th album - held by the Getty Research Institute and included in The Getty's Open Content program - is mainly concerned with studies of the bas-reliefs and sculptures from prominent Italian collections, including the ancient Roman paintings unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
David was arguably the most influential European artist of the late 18th century, his thoughtful style of "history painting" marking a change in the moral climate at a crucial time in European history: the end of the Ancien Regime and birth of the French Revolution. David, a close friend of the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, was an active supporter of the French Revolution (he voted for the execution of Louis XVI in the National Convention) and became effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. After Robespierre's fall from power, David was imprisoned and upon his release he aligned himself with yet another political regime, that of Napoleon I, a support which gave birth to one of the most famous portraits of "The Little Corporal" - Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass - in which the military leader is depicted in heroic posture upon a rearing horse.


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A Pamphlet on Verdi (1901)

Oct 10, 2013

A small pamphlet (in the series "Little journeys to the homes of great musicians") on the life of the Italian composer Guiseppe Verdi, beginning with a fictionalised account of his childhood meeting with his early patron Signior Barezzi and his eldest daughter Margherita, with whom Verdi ended up falling in love.
He sort of clung to the iron pickets, did the boy, and pressed his thin face through the fence, and listened. Some one was playing the piano in the big house, and the windows with their little diamond  panes were flung open to catch the evening breeze. He listened. His big grey eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated, — he was trying to see the music as well as hear it.
The boy's hair matched the yellow of his face, being one shade lighter, sun-bleached from going hatless. His clothes were as yellow as the yellow of his face, and shaded off into the dust that strewed the street. He was like a quail in a stubble field — you might have stepped over him and never seen him at all. He listened, Almost every evening someone played the piano in the big house. He had discovered the fact a week before. And now when the dusk was gathering, he would watch his chance and slide away from the hut where his parents lived, and run fast up the hill, and along the shelving roadway to the tall iron fence that marked the residence of Signior Barezzi. He would creep along under the stone wall and crouching there, would wait and listen for the music. Several evenings he had come and waited, and waited, and waited, — and not a note or a voice did he hear.
Once it had rained, and he didn't mind it much, for he expected every moment the music would strike up, you know, — and who cares for cold, or wet, or even hunger, if one can hear good music! The air grew chill and the boy's thread-bare jacket stuck to his bony form like a postage stamp to a letter. Little rivulets of water ran down his hair and streamed off his nose and cheeks. He waited — he was waiting for the music.
He might have waited until the water dissolved his insignificant cosmos into just plain yellow mud, and then he would have been simply distributed all along the gutter, down to the stream, and down the stream to the river, and down the river to the ocean; and no one would ever have heard of him again. But Signior Barezzi's coachman came along that night, keeping close to the fence under the trees to avoid the wet; and the coachman fell over the boy.
Now, when we fall over anything we always want to kick it, — no matter what it is, be it a cat, dog, stump, stick, stone, or human. The coachman being but clay (undissolved) turned and kicked the boy. Then he seized him by the collar, and accused him of being a thief. The lad acknowledged the indictment, and stammeringly tried to explain that it was only music he was trying to steal ; and that it really made no difference because even if one did fill himself full of the music, there was just as much left for other people, since music was different from most things.
The thought was not very well expressed, although the idea was all right, but the coachman failed to grasp it. So he tingled the boy's bare legs with the whip he carried, by way of answer, duly cautioning him never to let it occur again, and released the prisoner on parole. But the boy forgot and came back the next night. He sat on the ground below the wall, intending to keep out of sight ; but when the music began he stood up, and now, with face pressed between the pickets, he listened.
The wind sighed softly through the orange trees; the air was heavy with the perfume of flowers ; the low of cattle came from across the valley, and on the evening breeze from an open casement rose the strong, vibrant yet tender strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The lad listened.
"Do you like music?" came a voice from behind.
The boy awoke with a start, and tried to butt his head through the pickets to escape in that direction. He thought it was the coachman. He turned and saw the kindly face of Signior Barezzi himself.
"Do I like music? Me! No, I mean yes, when it is like that!" he exclaimed, beginning his reply with a tremolo and finishing bravura.
"That is my daughter playing; come inside with me."
The hand of the great man reached out, and the urchin clutched at it as if it were something he had been looking and longing for. They walked through the big gates where a stone lion kept guard on each side. The lions never moved. They walked up the steps and entering the pzirlor, saw a young woman seated at the piano.
"Grazia, dear, here is the little boy we saw the other day — you remember ? I thought I would bring him in."
The young woman came forward and touched the lad on his tawny head with one of her beautiful hands — the beautiful hands that had just been playing the Sonata.
"That's right, little boy, we have seen you outside there before, & if I had known you were there tonight, I would have gone out and brought you in ; but Papa has done the service for me. Now, you must sit down right over there where I can see you, and I will play for you. But won't you tell us your name ?"
"Me?" replied the boy, "why, my name is Giuseppe Verdi— I am ten years old, going on 'leven — you see I like your playing because I play myself, a little!"


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Come Take a Trip in my Airship (1904)

Sep 25, 2013

Rendition by Welsh-born baritone singer J. W. Myers of a song composed in 1904 by fellow countryman George "Honey Boy" Evans and written by the American Ren Shields. The song would go on to be recorded, with slight variations, by a string of popular musicians including Jonny Cash and more recently Natalie Merchant.


text:
A little wander down the catwalk of time...

Sep 10, 2013


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Wear Celluloid Collars and Cuffs (ca.1870)

Nov 7, 2013

A charming set of 19th Century American trade cards, advertising - via the medium of a frog and gnome-like character - collars and cuffs made of a waterproof linen (celluloid). After the Civil War there was a huge boom in advertising throughout the United States. The new widespread network of railroads which covered the land enabled the mass production of industrial and consumer goods on a scale never seen before and with this rise in goods came also a need to rise above the competition via eye-catching adverts. Advertising spread to a huge variety of media, including catalogues, broadsides, newspapers and sets of advertising cards like those featured here, miniature posters, about the size of a postcard, which were handed out as souvenirs at major expositions.


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Animated GIFs: Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908)

Sep 26, 2013

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from the French caricaturist, cartoonist and animator Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie. Made in 1908, this hand-drawn animation is considered by many film historians to be the very first animated cartoon. Despite appearances it is not created on a blackboard but rather on paper, the blackboard effect achieved by shooting each of the 700 drawings onto negative film. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images on to surrounding walls.
You can see the full film featured in our Films collection here.
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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter
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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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Robert Cornelius’ Self-Portrait: The First Ever “Selfie” (1839)

Nov 19, 2013

In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries announced their word of the year to be “selfie”, which they define as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” Although the rampant proliferation of the technique is quite recent, the "selfie" itself (if defined as being a photograph one takes of oneself) is far from being a strictly modern phenomenon. Indeed, the photographic self-portrait is surprisingly common in the very early days of photography exploration and invention, when it was often more convenient for the experimenting photographer to act as model as well. In fact, the picture considered by many to be the first photographic portrait ever taken was a "selfie". The image in question was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia named Robert Cornelius. Setting up his camera at the back of the family store in Philadelphia, Cornelius took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back of the image he wrote "The first light Picture ever taken. 1839."


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Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1785)

Oct 15, 2013

Volume 1 (find Volume 2 here) of the 6th edition of Samuel Johnson's epic achievement A Dictionary of the English Language, published a year after his death in 1785. Originally published 30 years previously on 15th April 1755, the mammoth tome took Johnson nearly 9 years to complete, remarkably almost completely single-handedly, and is now considered as one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
When it came out the book was huge, not just in scope (it contained a 42,773-long word list) but also in size: its pages were 18 inches (46 cm) tall and nearly 20 inches (50 cm) wide. Johnson himself pronounced the book "Vasta mole superbus" ("Proud in its great bulk"). One of Johnson's important innovations was to illustrate the meanings of his words by literary quotation, of which there are around 114,000. The authors most frequently cited by Johnson include Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden but also included sentences taken from the popular press of his day.
An entire scan of the first edition of Johnson's book can be found at the wonderful Johnson's Dictionary Online site - and also a nearly 8% (at the time of writing this) complete transcription.


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The Coronation of King Ladislaus of Poland (1633)

Sep 5, 2013

Illustration from a book celebrating the coronation of King Ladislaus of Poland in February of 1633. A rather rotund looking Ladislaus (presuming the figure is, in fact, the king) hovers in the clouds with the Latin words Ingenium Naturae on a banner above his head, literally translating as "natural talent".


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Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908)

Sep 26, 2013

An animated film by French caricaturist, cartoonist and animator Émile Cohl. It is one of the earliest examples of hand-drawn animation, and considered by many film historians to be the very first animated cartoon. Despite appearances the animation is not created on a blackboard but rather on paper, the blackboard effect achieved by shooting each of the 700 drawings onto negative film. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images on to surrounding walls.


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Two songs from Verdi’s La Traviata (1910)

Oct 10, 2013

"Ah! fors'è lui" and "Sempre libera" from Act I of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata performed by the Spanish singer Lucrezia Bori in August 1910 for Edison Records. Verdi's opera in 3 acts has a libretto penned by Francesco Maria Piave and is based on La Dame aux Camélias (1852), a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas.


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Flowers and Pictures of the Holy Land

Oct 9, 2013

A selection of pages from a remarkable book produced sometime in the 1890s, an album of hand-tinted photographs depicting landmark sites in the "Holy Land", opposite to which are mounted arrangements of dried flowers picked from the location shown. The album is bound in boards of olive wood with inlaid border and leather spine. It was produced and sold by the publisher Boulos Meo at his antique shop at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. See more over at The Getty Research Institute.


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Edison’s backwards bicycle rider (1899)

Sep 2, 2013

An animated GIF created by Okkult Motion Pictures excerpted from Bicycle Trick Riding (1899), a 38” film dated March 20th, 1899 by Thomas A. Edison, showing perhaps the first ever footage of a bicycle trick. See the film here.
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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter
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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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W.F. Hooley reads Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1898)

Nov 19, 2013

150 years ago today, on November 19th 1863, President Lincoln delivered his famous speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg Civil War Cemetery, a cemetery set up to house and honour the dead from one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War which had taken place four months earlier (the sad aftermath of which is pictured above in a photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan). Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address was in fact meant to be secondary to other presentations that day, following on as it did from a two hour speech by the orator Edward Everett. Although Lincoln's was only just over two minutes long in it's delivery, it came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In it's short span, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis, with "a new birth of freedom," that would bring true equality to all of its citizens. Lincoln also managed to redefine the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality.
There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln's handwriting, each with a slightly different text, and named for the people who first received them: Nicolay, Hay, Everett, Bancroft and Bliss. Two copies apparently were written before delivering the speech; the remaining ones were produced months later for soldier benefit events. The text below is from the Bliss copy written by Lincoln after the event, in 1864, and is the most widely reproduced, including being on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
This reading is recorded in New York by E. Berliner's Gramophone on September 21st 1898, performed by W.F. Hooley.


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That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die (1580)

Aug 29, 2013

...let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests... Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.
Works of Michel de Montaigne, comprising his essays, journey into Italy, and letters, with notes from all the commentators, biographical and bibliographical notices, etc.; 1864; Hurd and Houghton, New York.
The 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, best known for popularising the essay as a literary genre. He published and revised his Essais (translated literally as "Attempts" or Trials") over a period spanning from approximately 1570 to 1592. The intention of this huge corpus of essays on a myriad of subjects, contained in three books and 107 chapters of variable lengths, was to record for the 'private benefit of friends and kinsmen ... some traits of my character and of my humours.' In the essay featured here “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne turns his thoughts to mortality and the need to face it head on without fear.