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Clouds of Unknowing: Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas (1830)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 27, 2021

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps", says the seafaring raconteur Charles Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). "At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'" Of course, these "blank spaces" were anything but. The no-man's-lands that colonial explorers like Marlow found most inviting (the Congo River basin, Tasmania, the Andaman Islands) were, in fact, richly populated, and faced devastating consequences in the name of imperial expansion.
In the same troublesome vein as Marlow, Edward Quin's Historical Atlas painted cartographic knowledge as a candle coruscating against the void of ignorance, represented in his unique vision by a broiling mass of black cloud. Each map represents the bounds of geographical learning at a particular point in history, from a specific civilizational perspective, beginning with Eden, circa "B.C. 2348". In the next map titled "B.C. 1491. The Exodus of the Israelites", Armenia, Assyria, Arabia, Aram, and Egypt form an island of light, pushing back the black clouds of unknowing. As history progresses — through various Roman dynasties, the reign of Charlemagne, and the Crusades — the foul weather retreats further. In the map titled "A.D. 1498. The Discovery of America", the transatlantic exploits of the so-called Age of Discovery force Quin to employ a shift in scale — the luminescence of his globe now extends to include Africa and most of Asia, but North America hides behind cumulus clouds, with its “unnamed” eastern shores peeking out from beneath a storm of oblivion. In the Atlas' last map, we find a world without darkness, not a trace of cloud. Instead, unexplored territories stretch out in the pale brown of vellum parchment, demarcating "barbarous and uncivilized countries", as if the hinterlands of Africa and Canada are awaiting colonial inscription.
Not much is known about Edward Quin, the Oxford graduate, London barrister, and amateur cartographer whose Atlas was published two years after his death at the age of thirty-four. We learn, thanks to Walter Goffart's research into historical atlases, that Quin's images were more popular than his words. The well-regarded cartographer William Hughes rescaled the maps for a new edition in 1846, discarding their artist's accompanying text. The Atlas' enduring technical advancement, which influenced subsequent cartographers, can be found in its ingenious use of negative space. Emma Willard's Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History, for instance, features cloudy borders that seem very much indebted to Quin.
Looking back from a contemporary vantage, the Historical Atlas remains memorable for what is not shown. Quin's cartography inadvertently visualizes the ideology of empire: a geographic chauvinism that had little respect for the knowledge of those beyond imperial borders. And aside from depicting the reach of Kublai Khan, his focus remains narrowly European and Judeo-Christian. While Quin strives for accuracy, he admits to programmatic omission. "The colours we have used being generally meant to point out and distinguish one state or empire from another. . . were obviously inapplicable to deserts peopled by tribes having no settled form of government, or political existence, or known territorial limits". Instead of representing these groups, Quin, like his clouds, has erased them from view.


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Figure/Ground: Alphonse Allais’ April Fools Album (1897)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 9, 2021

Alphonse Allais (1854–1905) “was probably the finest humorous writer France has ever produced”, writes the translator Miles Kingston in a forward to the recent collected edition of his work, but remains “an almost totally obscure figure” in the English-speaking world. This is puzzling because Allais’ innovations are manifold. They range from the impressive though quasi-conventional — becoming editor of the newspaper Le Chat Noir; dabbling in photography and rubber production; inventing a version of Nescafé avant la lettre — to the utterly bizarre. Finding traditional hotel wake-up calls jarring, Allais would arrange for the concierge to phone the guests on either side of his room, rising at dawn to the muffled sounds of his neighbors’ outrage.
A man of many talents, Allais’ series of paintings, collected in the monograph Album primo-avrilesque (roughly translated as An April Fools Album) arose, perversely, from his lack of aptitude in the realm of visual art. Each of the seven monochrome plates, bordered by lace-like decorations, features a title which implies the dissolution of figure into ground. A Campbell’s-soup-red rectangle comes with the title Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea (an effect of Aurora Borealis). A frame filled with nothing but blue, anticipating Yves Klein’s later experimentation, gets explained by an effusive caption: Astonishment of young naval recruits seeing, for the first time, your blue, O Mediterranean Sea! Allais’ white painting, which antecedes Rauschenberg’s modular series by more than fifty years, claims to show anemic girls commuting to their first communion during snowfall. The Album ends with a funeral march. It consists of a blank musical staff, beating John Cage to the punch, perhaps meant to be “played” alongside another Allais invention: a hearse whose coffin compartment contains a cremator.
In the Album, we witness Allais’ humor assume a register that is more than merely off-color. The funeral march appears below a dedication — for “a great deaf man” — insisting that ableist prejudice follows one beyond the grave. His black plate comes with the title Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit (Negroes fighting in a cellar, at night). As the art historian Rebecca Zorach notes, the joke sabotages the series’ conceit of representation. If there is no light in the supposed cave, why would skin color even matter?
Unlike most of the other figures in the series. . . the African bodies of the black painting are socially undifferentiated. They don’t, apparently, wear clothes, they don’t interact with objects, they do nothing but fight with one another, in the dark, and *of* the dark. They simply *are* their bodies, unseeable and unknowable. The reduction to darkness, not just the antiquated nomenclature of “negroes,” which could pass in some other circumstance, cements the racism of the phrase.
Allais’ preface offers little in the way of critical distance, imploring his readers to let the work speak equally for both itself and himself. Yet the joke was not, in fact, Allais’ own (though he later claimed it as such), but an imitation of poet Paul Bilhaud’s “painting”, produced for the Salon des Incohérents. This proto-Dadaist exhibit responded to the critique — widespread in 1890s France — that modern artists could not paint. Gathering a group of artists who, in fact, could not paint, the Hydropathe Jules Lévy held this salon in his Left Bank apartment. Thousands were said to have attended the exhibition, including Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Wagner, and a Bavarian king.
Set within a wider history of the representation of Black bodies in Western art, Bilhaud and Allais’ gag is not unique in its reduction of subjects to monochrome colors. Tanya Sheehan opens her study of photography, race, and humor by discussing a stereocard, produced by the Universal Photo Art Company of Philadelphia, titled A Study in Black and White (1900). Here Black infants are seated amid a mound of cotton that expands beyond the frame. “Since most photographic processes depended on light’s stimulation of silver nitrate to darken, or blacken, the white ground of a photosensitive surface, the medium served as a ready metaphor for racial difference and the ground upon which many jokes about race were laid.” While photographic exposure complicates questions of racial imaging — where, stretching into the contemporary, digital world, optical white balance encodes social narratives about “normal” contrast, even without a “Shirley card” — racism also haunts the artistic tradition closest to this Album: monochromatic painting. In 2015, researchers at Russia’s Tretyakov Gallery discovered an inscription under the topcoat of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). Its contents? Bilhaud and Allais’ joke (though experts differ on the inscriber).

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

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


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Albert Millican’s Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter (1891)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 27, 2021

"I was induced by the cravings of a well-whetted appetite to put aside all scruples of delicacy or custom and discuss the merits of the flesh of the celebrated iguana", writes Albert Millican with typical badinage during his horticultural adventure memoir. If, in today's world, your local florist or hothouse caretaker does not strike you as needing "a stock of knives, cutlasses, revolvers, rifle, [and] an overflowing supply of tobacco" in order to procure carnations and the fixings for bouquets, the nineteenth-century orchid hunter was a very different character.
Between 1887 and 1891, Millican made five trips to the orchid-rich areas of South America, concentrating on the Northern Andes. This was an era of orchidelirium, when a single rare specimen could fetch around $25,000 in today's money. Prospectors shipped millions of orchid bulbs to Europe and less than one-percent survived the journey. The reasons for this sudden interest in orchids has several overlapping explanations: the ascension of the modern greenhouse; Darwin's work on the coevolution of insects and orchids; and a wider Victorian fascination with curios collected from around the world. Millican's own story ends in the tenor in which he lived: he was stabbed to death by rivals while pilfering rare flowers.
But why orchids? And not other blooming delights: the mammoth Amazonian waterlily, with its three-meter diameter, or the titan arum, whose inflorescence looms over those who approach this plant that smells like rotting meat? "What is intriguing in this tangle of aesthetic enthrallment and unscrupulous trophy hunting", writes Richard Mabey in his book on the botanical imagination, "is the disproportion between the obsessional nature of orchid fancying and the character of the plants." When seeking a source for orchidelirium, Mabey and others have seized upon the longstanding bodily connotations of this delicate plant family that includes more than twenty-five thousand members. The word "orchid", for example, reaches back to the Greek orchis ("testicle"), while the basic shape of most orchids includes a lip or labellum, sometimes divided into lobes, which have been portrayed as legs and other anatomical aspects --- a gendered association that, as Katy Kelleher traces, has a particularly violent history.
In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and Britain especially, the orchid imaginary went into overdrive, accruing additional senses and secret meanings, thanks to the flower's fleshy qualities, far-flung origins, and delicate beauty, which became evocative touchstones in visual art and literature. In Martin Johnson Heade's painting titled Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871), for example, a light-pink flower appears amid an otherworldly landscape dripping with moss and moisture, framed by a humid sun and the titular birds circling a clutch of eggs. During Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, this same family of flowers becomes a euphemism for sex, when Swann and Odette refer to doing or making "Cattleya". Just this one genus of orchid alone could have a book-length history, as it was "discovered" in England by the merchant and botanist William Cattley, who found the tendrils of C. labiata mixed with other packing materials in a shipment received from Brazil, before being lost for several decades, when its true source location could not be found.
Millican's Travels and Adventures plays into this horticultural frenzy, such as when he describes a Colombian grotto where "the trees are literally covered with Cattleya labiata", but the book also inadvertently reveals how orchid hunting both perpetuated and profited from global systems of exploitation and inequality. Millican writes, for instance, about how Cattleya mossiae can now be had with "the greatest ease" in Caracas, "for the Indians bring large quantities of plants into the city for sale at a very nominal price, instead of the poor plant-collector having to brave all the dangers of the forest". If this sounds like a potentially collaborative enterprise, Millican later tips his hand, describing how "the orchid gems" of northern Colombia will remain inaccessible "until the last red man has disappeared from his territory". There was human as well as ecological devastation as a result of this European stockpiling. In order to capture Cattleya mendelii, a flower that adorns the title-page displayed above, Millican cut down over four thousand trees, writing off the clear-cutting as "no serious injury". In his cultural history of orchids, Jim Endersby disagrees: "it is hard to read of such wholesale ecological vandalism without weeping".
Elsewhere we catch glimpses of the colonial networks that allowed Millican to circumnavigate the world, such as when he docks near "a coolie station, where the newly-imported East Indiamen find an asylum until their services are in demand for the sugar plantations". There is much to dislike about Millican's rhetoric, irredeemably tarnished by an imperial arrogance and denigratory anxiety regarding other cultures and peoples, which is not useful to quote examples of here. And yet, the book remains worth browsing for how it complicates ephemeral beauty, making us confront the histories hidden in the folds of petals, stigma and stem.


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Visualizing Migraines: The Attempts of Hubert Airy and Others to Depict Scintillating Scotomata
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 18, 2021

“Migraine affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all civilisations, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history”, wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks in a 1970 study that arose in response to the common medical sentiment that “little is known about migraine and even less to be done about it”.
While a migraine shares some symptoms with the common headache, frequently-experienced visual distortions set it apart from the effects of tension, stress, or dehydration. And yet, despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, its medical observation is relatively recent. As Katherine Foxhall chronicles in Migraine: A History, John Fothergill’s description of a headache he suffered in the winter of 1778 is thought to be the first anglophone account of a migraine’s ocular disturbances. He saw “a singular kind of glimmering in the sight; objects change their apparent position surrounded by luminous angles, like those of a fortification. Giddiness comes on, headache, and sickness”. Fothergill was detailing, with the architectural language of fortification, what has been subsequently named scintillating scotomata: serrated hallucinations in the shape of the letter “C”, which resemble the angular walls of a bastion.
Discontent with suffering alone, the physician Hubert Airy set out to draw and share his migraine experiences in 1870. He corresponded frequently with the astronomer John Herschel, who, like Fothergill, found himself overcome, during an otherwise uneventful breakfast, by a debilitating “pattern in straight-lined angular forms, very much in general aspect like the drawing of a fortification, with salient and re-entering angles, bastions and ravelins, with some suspicion of faint lines of colour between the dark lines”. A keen-eyed observer of the outer world, who first coined the term "photography", Herschel's neurological condition forced him to turn this focus inward.
While Herschel was convinced that his visions signalled the onset of blindness, Airy believed the patterns he saw during migraine attacks — which his father, George Airy, also prone to scotomata, described as “Norman arches” — revealed something important about the brain. In 1870, Hubert Airy delivered a paper to the Royal Society in Cambridge, which was subsequently published under title “On a distinct form of Transient Hemiopsia”. During an otherwise scientific exposition, Airy inserts a journal entry from 1854, detailing his first migraine attack while still a student. Here we find a description uncannily reminiscent of both Fothergill and Herschel:
When it was in its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously. . . All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive.
Accompanying the paper, Airy included several plates visualizing the progression of scintillating scotoma. “So why did Airy think that indulging in a recital of his personal experiences was worthy of presentation to the Royal Society?” asks Katherine Foxhall. The answer reveals how technological progress provided medical research with a new set of metaphors. “Because, he concluded, this teichopsia [scintillating scotoma] was more than ‘merely’ a disease. It could be regarded as ‘a veritable “Photograph” of a morbid process going on in the brain.’”
Few things remain as unrelenting across history as the pain in our heads. Mervyn J. Eadie tells the story of what some believe to be the earliest surviving description of a headache, recorded by an ancient Babylonian cuneiformist and translated by Reginald Campbell Thompson. Here too, perhaps, we find the “flashing” or scintillating phenomena of a migraine: “Headache roameth in the desert, blowing like the wind / Flashing like lightning, it is loosed above and below”. Thompson also revealed a potential alleviant in his The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903), discovered long before the days of ibuprofen and paracetamol:
Take the hair of a virgin kid,Let a wise woman spin (it) on the right side . . .  And bind the head of the sick man . . .     That the Headache may ascend to heavenLike the smoke of a peaceful homestead
In medieval Europe, a similar link persisted between head pain and the heavens, whereby the migraine aura was possibly understood as a divine revelation: the scotoma’s angles taken for angels. When Charles Singer (1876-1960), the British Society for the History of Science’s first president, viewed the medieval manuscript known as Scivias (completed in 1151) — where the mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s visions are illuminated in vibrant, crenulated patterns — he “recognized at once that the figures . . . resembled descriptions by patients of what they had seen during attacks of migraine”.
You can browse Airy’s images and a fortification-like illumination depicting Hildegard of Bingen’s visions from the Wiesbaden Codex below, as well as additional visualizations by neurologists William Gowers and Joseph Babinski.


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Solid Objects: 16th-Century Geometric and Perspective Drawings
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 8, 2021

This sequence of increasingly complex geometrical figures and perspective drawings — collected in a sixteenth-century watercolor manuscript and preserved at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel — comes with no author's note, editor's preface, or running commentary. We know very little about its origins. All we have are shapes and color, with the occasional totem (eagle, rooster, and even a putto holding something like a pinwheel) dwarfed by the immensity of lines and angles.
When compared to other geometric images contemporary to the manuscript, it inhabits a middle ground between the sober studies found in Augustin Hirschovogel's Geometria  (1543) and Lorenz Stoer's ethereal geometric landscapes (1567). While the manuscript remains a mystery, certain pages share a strong resemblance to the etchings by Jost Amman for Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) — and one image bears the inscription "Geometria et Perspectiva Corporum Regularium" (Geometry and Perspective of the Regular Bodies), though this was a somewhat common descriptive name for studies of this kind.
Indeed, the manuscript displays the German Renaissance fascination for geometrical solids demonstrated by Jamnitzer, Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, and Hans Lencker, which paralleled similar experiments in Italy conducted by Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Leonardo da Vinci, and several others — part of a larger "rise of perspective" in visual art and the renewed mathematical fascination with polyhedra. According to Thomas Christensen, it was thought that one could derive, from geometric solids, "God's secret design for the universe".
Without a precis or introduction, we might find ourselves adrift in a world of forms, were it not for the intuitive logic exhibited in the order of these drawings. After the pyramid and cube, we find an icosahedron — a polyhedron with twenty sides, the progressive extrapolation of those earlier shapes. Then a beautiful, ruby-painted variation of the "great dodecahedron", which contains pentagrams in its excavations. And suddenly, compounds: combinations of octahedrons and cubes, faceted and almost stellated in certain instances.
As the geometry becomes more complex, the drawings gain worldly details: a spherical surface covered with a triangular mesh is staged on an angular stand, the kind that you might find attached to a globe, situating the abstract realm of mathematical possibility against solid ground. A beautiful example in this regard features a pale-yellow sphere, which has been grooved like a paper lantern or an ornamentally peeled orange. It sits on an irregular jade barrel, stacked on a low pink table. The tower of shapes leans slightly rightwards, lending a profound sense of movement to the otherwise meaningless collection of surfaces. On the left, leg raised, a white wagtail sounds its approving chisick.
The concluding pages create a grand finale: lattice spheres; elongated pastel pyramids that resemble someone's dream of an ancient city; two tori, cut, interlinked, and set upon a pedestal, like a surrealist sculpture of donuts hugging; a very unexpected and realistic lute, floating over a lily-padded toad; and then, the manuscript's penultimate perspective drawing — a carmine book, whose cover is inscribed with an abstract shape, opened to show a cross resting on a stand. At this point in the series, steeped in curves and surfaces, the singular Christian symbol summons a sense of geometry both profane and sacred: although many are utterly commonplace, the forms in this manuscript seem to transport us just beyond the realm of comprehension.


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Illustrations of Ventilation (1869)

May 5, 2012

Illustrations showing movement of air through various rooms, from Lectures on Ventilation (1869) by Lewis W. Leeds. The full book can be seen here on Internet Archive.


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Codex Mendoza (1542)

May 14, 2012

The Codex Mendoza is an Aztec codex, created about twenty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the intent that it be seen by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. It contains a history of the Aztec rulers and their conquests, a list of the tribute paid by the conquered, and a description of daily Aztec life, in traditional Aztec pictograms with Spanish explanations and commentary. It is named after Antonio de Mendoza, then the viceroy of New Spain, who may have commissioned it. After creation in Mexico City, it was sent by ship to Spain. The fleet, however, was attacked by French privateers, and the codex, along with the rest of the booty, was taken to France. There it came into the possession of André Thévet, cosmographer to King Henry II of France. Thévet wrote his name in five places on the codex, twice with the date 1553. It was later bought by the Englishman Richard Hakluyt for 20 French francs. Some time after 1616 it was passed to Samuel Purchase, then to his son, and then to John Selden. The codex was deposited into the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1659, 5 years after Selden's death, where it remained in obscurity until 1831, when it was rediscovered by Viscount Kingsborough and brought to the attention of scholars. (Wikipedia)


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Around the World on the Phonograph (1888)

Apr 16, 2012

Thought to be the oldest surviving recording of Thomas Edison's voice, made in October 1888 he describes an imagined trip "around the world on the phonograph," by Cunard steamer from New York City to Liverpool, through Europe and Asia, noting specific ships, railroads, cities, and points of interest en route. In the following decades Edison's phonograph invention would itself spread "around the world".


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A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden (1899)

May 10, 2012

Walter Crane (1845–1915) is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. (Wikipedia)


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Early Footage From Space (1963)

May 4, 2012

Universal Newsreel showing footage of the launch of a Titan II rocket in 1963 along with images from the unmanned capsule of the first stage being dropped. Beneath the falling debris of the discarded first stage the curvature of the earth is clearly visible: "Through the magic of the camera earthlings take their first ride into space."


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Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation (1887)

Apr 15, 2012

Louisa S. Cook's Geometrical psychology, or, The Science of Representation: An Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts details Benjamin Betts' remarkable attempts to mathematically model human consciousness through geometric forms. From the Introduction:
The symbolic forms which Mr. Betts has evolved through his system of Representation resemble, when developed in two dimensions, conventionalised but very scientifically and beautifully conventionalised leaf-outlines. When in more than two dimensions they approximate to the forms of flowers and crystals. .... The fact that he has accidentally portrayed plant-forms when he was studying human evolution is an assurance to Mr. Betts of the fitness of the symbols he has developed, as it affords presumptive evidence that the laws he is studying intuitively admit of universal application.
After living in India for a spell, Benjamin Betts, who was educated in England as an architect, obtained a post as “Trigonometrical Computor of the Survey Department” in Auckland, New Zealand’s Civil Service. But he moonlighted as metaphysician, developing a “Science of Representation” based on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s remark, in The Science of Knowledge, that lines and circles might correspond with modes of consciousness. Not everyone understood his ideas, however: Betts wrote a letter to John Ruskin, enclosing his illustrations, who replied with a chastisement: art must be spontaneous. But it was not art that Betts was aiming for and he found a better correspondent in Mary Everest Boole, the self-taught mathematician and wife of the late George Boole.
The images featured here both refer to what Cook calls “horn-shaped corolla”, one classified as “Ond” and the other “Onde”, alpha and omega forms of the “animal sense-consciousness which underlies the human or rational sense-consciousness”. The corollas are expanding and open because, according to Cook, this is how Betts thought the ego functions:
This progressive qualification of consciousness is represented by the Onde, as the progressive quantification of consciousness is by the Ond. The latter starts from a centre of possibility and extends itself ad infinitum into objectivity. The former starts from an objective circumference absolutely limited for the time being, and qualifies itself subjectively ad infinitum. Thus a complementary form of consciousness is evolved, a form contingent on the evolution of the first form. The Ond may be called the form of the Intellect, and the Onde the form of the Emotion of a rational ego on the sense plane.


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Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1680)

Apr 25, 2012

In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Find out more in Brian Garret's article for The Public Domain Review - "The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew" - which explores how Grew’s pioneering ‘mechanist’ vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy.


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Turtle Anatomy (1821)

May 23, 2012

Images from Anatome Testudinis Europaeae (1819-21) by the German physician and naturalist Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus (1776–1827). Bojanus was born at Bouxwiller in Alsace and studied at Darmstadt and the University of Jena. In 1806 he became professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Vilnius, switching to comparative anatomy in 1824. As well as his anatomy of turtles, he was also the author of several scientific discoveries, including a glandular organ in bivalvular molluscs that is now known as organ of Bojanus, and the aurochs. In 1821, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Wikipedia)


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Dazzle Ships

Apr 19, 2012

Dazzle camouflage (also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting) was a military camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. The idea is credited to the artist Norman Wilkinson who was serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve when he had the idea in 1917. After the Allied Navies failed to develop effective means to disguise ships in all weathers, the dazzle technique was employed, not in order to conceal the ship, but rather to make it difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size, speed and direction of travel. After seeing a canon painted in dazzle camouflage trundling through the streets of Paris, Picasso is reported to have taken credit for the innovation which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique.


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An Apparent Tour of the Titanic (1912)

Apr 11, 2012

A short film which appears to show the interior and deck of the Titanic only minutes prior to its ill-fated voyage in April 1912. Included in the footage is Captain E.J. Smith apparently inspecting the ship just 10 minutes prior to departure, various deck promenades, and the actual leaving of the ship. We are reliably informed however that it is a sneaky bit of sleight of hand by the newsreel company, splicing together footage from other ships (mostly the Titanic's 'sister' ship The Olympic). Notice the scratched out name plates on the frames which appear as floating white marks in the film.


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A Burlesque Translation of Homer (1797)

Apr 21, 2012

Homer's Iliad set to bawdy verse by Thomas Bridges (c.1710-c.1775), originally published in 1762 under the pseudonym Caustic Barebones. The work achieved some popularity, and was reprinted several times, the last in 1797. In 1765 Bridges wrote The Battle of the Genii, a burlesque of John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was once attributed to Francis Grose. Bridges' only novel was The Adventures of a Bank-Note, published in 1770.


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Rip Van Winkle (1896)

May 12, 2012

The first film adaptation of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", a short story about a man who awakes after a twenty-year-long sleep to a huge white beard on his face and a much changed world. In this footage, Joseph Jefferson, the actor most associated with the character on the nineteenth-century stage, makes a series of short films recreating scenes from his stage adaptation.


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How to Become a Magician (1882)

May 16, 2012

A grand assortment of various tricks, illusions, conjurings, deceptions and slights of hand....
The following pages are not intended to make the young reader either a cheat or a trickster; there is nothing perhaps so utterly contemptible in every-day life as trickery and deceit, and we would caution our young friends not to cultivate a love of deception, which is only allowable in such feats of amusement, because it is in fact not deception at all, when everybody expects to be puzzled, and is only left to find out the mystery the best way he can.


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Welsh Fairytales and Other Stories (1894)

Apr 12, 2012

Collection of stories told to the author during his stay in Anglesey during the winter of 1891-2, mostly involving fairies in some form or other, and either the finding or losing of money.


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Farmer plays a song with ‘hand-farts’ (1933)

Apr 17, 2012

Universal Newsreel from 1933 showing Cecil H. Dill, a farmer from Traverse City, Michigan, demonstrating his ability to render popular melodies by pressing his hands together. After the performance, which seems to be of Yankee Doodle, Dill modestly tells how he discovered his unusual talent while staring rather intensely into the camera.


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Guess the Celeb behind the Driving Garb (1906)

May 9, 2012

Images from a 1906 issue of the French women's magazine Femina, the first of it's kind in France and which is still going today. These strange array of pictures are from a competition in which the readers were asked to identify the famous female 'artistes' of the day obscured behind a bizarre variety of women's driving headwear. We at the PDR are not having much luck getting a single one. Can you fare any better?


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Dances in Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation (1701)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 2, 2012

First published in 1701, Choregraphie details an early dance notation system invented in the 1680s at the court of Louis XIV. Four years after the book was published, its author Raoul-Auger Feuillet, maître de danse to the King, found himself subject to a formal complaint by another maître de danse, Pierre Beauchamp, who argued that Feuillet had taken credit for an invention that was in fact his own. Surviving in modified forms into the 1780s, the system is now known as Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. Voltaire ranked the invention as one of the “achievements of his day” and Denis Diderot devoted ten pages to the subject in his Encylopédie. In 1706, the book was translated into English by John Weaver under the title Orchesography, or the Art of Dancing.
While earlier dance manuals, such as Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchesographie (1588), separated musical notation, textual description, and gestural illustration, Choregraphie offered a complete system for notating the body in motion. The manual begins with five “true positions” for placing the feet, postures that largely correspond to classical ballet, and five “false positions”. From here we move on to steps, “the different figures the leg makes in moving”. The author recognizes these are “almost innumerable”, but nevertheless can be named: straight plain, open, circular or round, waving, and beaten. On the page, they are inscribed with symbols that look like musical notation writhing to its own rhythm: a waving step forwards resembles an eighth note with a wiggly body; an open step inwards conjures a bass clef arching its back. From steps, we move to marks: sinking, rising, springing, capers, falling, sliding, holding the foot up, pointing the toes, placing the heel, and turning various degrees. These marks add perpendicular lines onto the step’s stem, the way a sixteenth note differs from an eighth by means of its second flag. A deluge of rules and exceptions follow — conventions for changing positions, deciphering the proper order of notation, crossing the legs without finding yourself immobile. And all of these bodily graphemes come together in a beautiful, complex syntax of flowing motion, which intersects musical scores on the page, creating transcriptions of the Sarabande, Canary à deux, Gigue pour homme, and other historical dances.
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”, asked W. B. Yeats’ speaker in a 1927 poem. Chorographical notation asks the converse of this question and provides a solution for learning dance at a distance, separate from an instructor’s knowledgeable body. Like all forms of writing, choreography — literally the writing of choral movement — carries the ideologies of its origins. In the case of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, it was designed for courtly bodies, its grammar shaped by the postures of royal taste. And yet, it had sway beyond these halls. As Helen Williams argues, offshoots of the French notation may have helped shape the swirling plotlines of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). And in the first half of the twentieth century, when Rudolf von Laban was formulating his Labanotation system for recording human movement, he attempted to update Beauchamp-Feuillet notation to fit “the context of a modern culture of movement defined by industrial activity, the rise in physical and movement education, and the growth of a psychologically inflected understanding of movement.” Even in the least courtly choreographies, such as Lavinia Schulz’s notation for Four Movements of the Dead Woman (1921), we see a familiar set of strategies arise for tracking a whirling body through space and time.
Below you can browse a selection of images from Recueil de dances (1700), exhibiting dances by Feuillet using the notation explained in Choregraphie (1701). A different Recuiel de dances (1700), featuring the choreography of Louis-Guillaume Pécour in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, can be here.


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Fortification Theory (1600)

May 17, 2012

Images from Jean Errard's Fortification Réduicte Art and Démonstrée (Paris, 1600), a seminal work in fortification theory. Errard (1554-1610) was a mathematician by training, and used his love of geometry (he made several translation of Euclid's Elements) to develop a comprehensive theory of military fortifications. He developed a series of geometric designs,  based on polygons of various kinds, which were optimised for defence. The most important of his rules stressed the reliance on infantry for defence of a fortress, who, with their potential rapid rate of fire, were better suited than the artillery, which at this period, given its enormous consumption of gunpowder, was only suitable for providing enfilade fire, not engaging in frontal action.


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A Farewell To Arms (1932)

Apr 30, 2012

Film directed by Frank Borzage, and starring a young Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Benjamin Glazer is based on the 1929 semi-autobiographical novel by Ernest Hemingway set during World War 1 about a rebellious ambulance driver who falls in love with a nurse after drunkenly going AWOL.


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The Practical Magician and Ventriloquist’s Guide (1876)

May 16, 2012

Ex. 1. The Suffocated Victim - This was a favorite illustration of Mr. Love, the polyphonist. A large box or close cupboard is used indiscriminately, as it may be handy. The student will rap or kick the box apparently by accident. The voice will then utter a hoarse and subdued groan, apparently from the boxor closet.
Student (pointing to the box with an air of astonishment) : "What is that ?
Voice: I won't do so any more. I am nearly dead.
Student: Who are you ? How came you there ?
Voice: I only wanted to see what was going on. Let meout, do.
Student: But I don't know who you are.
Voice: Oh yes, you do.
Student: Who are you ?
Voice: Your old schoolfellow, Tom. You know me.
Student: Why, he's in Canada.
Voice (sharply): No he aint, he's here; but be quick.
Student (opening the lid): Perhaps he's come by the underground railroad ? Hallo !
Voice (not so muffled as described in direction): Now then, give us a hand.
Student (closing the lid or door sharply): No, I won't.
Voice (as before): Have pity (Tom, or Jack, or Mr_____, as the case may be), or I shall be choked.
Student: I don't believe you are what you say.
Voice : Why don't you let me out and see before I am dead?
Student {opening and shutting the lid or door and varying the voice accordingly): Dead ! not you. When did you leave Canada?
Voice: Last week. Oh ? I am choking.
Student : Shall I let him out ? {opening the door). There's no
one here.


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Rae Bourbon

Apr 23, 2012

During the Pansy Craze of 1930-1933 (mainly in Manhattan), gay clubs and performers, known as "pansy performers", experienced a huge surge in underground popularity. In 1932, Rae Bourbon was working full-time as a female impersonator at such clubs as Jimmy's Back Yard in Hollywood and Tait's in San Francisco. At the latter, in May 1933, police raided his "Boys Will Be Girls" review during a live radio broadcast. In the later 30s and early 40s he headlined at the Rendezvous in Los Angeles and starred in his own revue, "Don't Call Me Madam." Throughout the 50s and 60s Bourbon entertained at hundreds of clubs throughout the U.S. and released dozens of albums, certainly the most prolific female impersonator to have done the latter. His appearances are still fondly remembered by many who saw him when he toured in big and small towns all over the country, providing many isolated Gay men with a glimpse of the loose-knit urban Gay community of the pre-Stonewall era. His comedy was at once highbrow and lowbrow, overtly gay and covertly subversive. Despite his influence on gays, he remained vague about his own sexuality. There is evidence that he had relationships with both men and women, was married twice, and fathered at least one son. Bourbon excelled at generating numerous conflicting stories about himself. (From Wikipedia)


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Freedom Highway (1956)

May 22, 2012

In this film from the Prelinger Archives, a Greyhound bus rides from San Francisco to Washington D.C, transporting us at the same time through the landscape of American mythology (and unwavering patriotism). The cast of bus riders include: Fred Schroder who, embittered by the death of his son in Korea, is riding to Washington to accept a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor on the son's behalf; Jimmy Rollins, a Scout,  heading to Washington for his first Jamboree; Mary (a young Angie Dickinson) and Bill Roberts, a basketball star on the make; actor and country star Tex Ritter, playing himself, taking a short ride on the bus as it passes through Texas, singing about the Alamo and the "freedom road."; and most importantly, a black-suited mysterious stranger who appears, as if from nowhere, to transform the outlook of the passengers. Greyhound Lines and America have never looked so good. Winner of the Freedoms Foundation Special Award.


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The Memoirs of Count Boruwlaski (1820)

May 7, 2012

Józef Boruwłaski (1739–1837) was a Polish-born dwarf who toured in European and Turkish courts. Although not a nobleman by birth (the Count in his name did not refer to a real title), when Boruwlaski was fifteen and 64 cm (25 inches) tall he was adopted into the Eastern European aristocracy and taken into the care of Countess Humiecka. With the Countess he toured the homes of Europe's elite including Empress Maria Theresa and the ex-King of Poland. In 1960 he travelled with the Countess to Paris where he frequented the court in various masked balls and pageants, reportedly impressing the ladies greatly, and entertaining crowds with his guitar playing. When Stanisław II acceded to the throne of Poland, he took Boruwlaski under his protection. When Boruwlaski fell in love with the Countess' new companion, Isalina Barbutan, the countess threw him out but the King interceded on his behalf, gave him a small allowance and a coach to travel in, and with the royal backing he married Isalina. At first, Isalina, the child of a French couple who had settled in Poland, was reluctant to marry Joseph, but he bombarded her with love-letters and won her heart. At the age of 25, Boruwlaski stood 89 cm (35 inches tall), and five years later, measured 99 cm (39 inches), which was to be his final height. After further tours of Austria, Germany, and Turkey, he made his way to England with his wife, where he was presented to George IV and the rest of the royal family. He also met the Irish giant Patrick Cotter and the famously overweight Daniel Lambert. Although he was sometimes able to make a reasonable living from playing the guitar, the problems and expenses of touring sometimes wore Boruwlaski down. Money problems forced Joseph to display himself for money (which he found deeply humiliating) and to bring out three different editions of his autobiography, the last published at Durham in 1820. Eventually, in his advancing years, Boruwlaski accepted an offer to live in Durham, from Thomas Ebdon, organist of Durham cathedral. He died in Durham, on September 5, 1837, at the age of 97. (Wikipedia)


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Aino Folktales (1888)

Apr 13, 2012

The Ainu (アイヌ?), also called Aynu, Aino (アイノ), and in historical texts Ezo (蝦夷), are a group of indigenous people living in Japan and Russia - thought to originate from the Jōmon-jin people whom many think might have been the first to settle North America. Historically, they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin. A medieval Chinese historian referred to the Ainu region as the "Land of the Hairy Men" on account of the abundance of their facial hair compared to the typical inhabitant of Japan.


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Filippo Morghen’s Fantastical Visions of Lunar Life (1776)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Feb 23, 2021

“Engraver to the King of the Two Sicilies” was the stirring epithet of the eighteenth-century draughtsman, engraver, and print-seller Filippo Morghen. Much of his work concentrated on ruins, the countryside around Naples, and archaeological works such as those at Herculaneum, but his imagination ranged much further, to the extent that in 1776 he produced this fantasy Suite of the Most Notable Things...
This collection of ten etchings begins with a title page explaining, in Italian, the conceit: it is The Suite of the Most Notable Things Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon — a form of travel reportage. Scull and Hire, explains the text, have drawn and described their voyage, while Morghen is simply the engraver. This Philippe de La Hire is a historical figure, a French astronomer who lived from 1640 to 1718. Of Scull, nothing is known, and by  the second printing the next year he had been replaced by Bishop John Wilkins, a distinguished natural philosopher.
In devising such a voyage, Morghen was clearly influenced by scientific progress of the previous century. Writing for Cabinet, Viktoria Tkaczyk describes the development of flying machines during the seventeenth century: Bishop Francis Godwin had his Man in the Moone of 1638 carried there by geese. In the same year, and in a similar speculative vein, was Wilkins' own The Discovery of the World in the Moon.
Morghen's explorers mix technological innovation, colonial imagination, and a sense of rococo excess. We see them folding back the roof of their winged, wooden shed and elegantly emerging into a lunar landscape that looks remarkably like contemporary depictions and fantasies of the New World. Over nine further etchings they explore a landscape ripe with not unrealistic wildlife and plants, inhabited by tobacco-smoking, Native American-like residents. But mixed with this is a whimsical, size-altered imaginary world, in which we are never quite sure if the ”lunarians” are extremely small or the natural world around them exceptionally enlarged. Plate 8 depicts snails the size of dogs being fed to an enormous bird, and in several we see “pumpkins used as dwellings”. Yet in plate 9 we see a flock of normal-sized geese, and in plate 2 a normal-sized parrot (watching over the ensnaring of a rodent-like creature the size of a cow).
The prints were popular enough to go through at least three editions, and they have occasionally resurfaced during the twentieth century: four of the images were included in MoMA's 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and in 1990 a British small press published a version of the Suite with an introduction by science fiction maestro Brian Aldiss.

author: Melissa McCarth


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Early Illustrations of the Nervous System by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Jan 28, 2021

Much human behavior has by now been interpreted through the lens of neuroscience. Day after day, news outlets publish articles explaining how researchers have mapped some new part of the central nervous system — further correlating our thoughts, motions, and emotions to various “neural substrates” in our spinal cords and brains. The notion that our whole experience of the world is the result of a lot of little things called “neurons” has become, if not necessarily comprehensible, at least familiar to most of us.
Yet neuroscience is a very recent branch of biology. The “neuron doctrine”, which put forward the concept of the nervous system as a composite of discrete individual cells, did not gain traction until the late 1880s. In fact, Camillo Golgi — one of the scientists whose discoveries made the neuron doctrine possible — rejected it and instead clung to the “reticular theory”, which stated that the nervous system’s cells (what we would now call neurons) formed a single network, or reticulum.
The idea that living things are composed of cells is itself not yet two hundred years old. Though the English polymath Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and the Dutch businessman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) pioneered the construction and use of microscopes for scientific purposes, it was not until the 1820s that technology improved enough for microscopists to isolate cells. Around the same time, new dyes for staining animal tissue let scientists see that cell bodies (soma) could have only one nerve fibre (axon) but multiple “protoplasmic extensions” (dendrites) which appeared to allow cells to communicate.
Due in large part to technological limitations, even researchers with access to the most powerful nineteenth-century microscopes concluded that cells must communicate by fusing together and forming a network: this was the reticular theory that Golgi (1843–1926) brought to bear on his experiments.
Born the son of a doctor in a small town in Lombardy, Italy, Golgi studied at the University of Pavia, where he eventually specialized in the etiology of mental disorders. Eager to do research but in need of money, he took a job at a hospital, where, in a makeshift laboratory set up in the kitchen, he developed what he called the “black reaction”. Now known as the Golgi method, it involves immersing tissue specimens in silver nitrate, creating a black deposit on the soma, axon, and dendrites which, once placed under the microscope, become clearly visible against a yellow background. This method made it possible not only to trace the connections between neurons but also to visualize the complex networking structure of the brain and spinal cord.
Without the “black reaction”, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) might never have made the discoveries that still inform our understanding of the central nervous system today. Another son of a doctor born in a small town (Petilla de Aragon, in Zaragoza, Spain), Ramón y Cajal was a rebellious child who wanted to be an artist. This was not at all something his father encouraged, and there was a great deal of antipathy between them until, one day, the stern father invited the willful son to help him exhume human remains from local cemeteries. Sketching bones gave Ramón y Cajal a passion for anatomy that propelled him through his university years and medical school in Zaragoza. After a brief, unhappy, malaria-ridden stint as a medical officer for the Spanish army in Cuba, he returned to Spain, where he became a professor — one extremely passionate about the possibilities of modern microscopy.
All through the 1880s, Ramón y Cajal set about improving Golgi’s “black reaction”. Cutting thicker sections of tissue, staining more intensely, and using material from birds and young mammals (whose axons were not sheathed in the fatty substance myelin which interfered with the Golgi method), Ramón y Cajal established a more reliable staining procedure that allowed him, as Stanley Finger writes in Minds Behind the Brain, to “study the elements of the nervous system in a systematic way”.
Unable to find any scientific journal willing to publish his findings — which, like Golgi’s, included many illustrations — Ramón y Cajal founded a journal of his own. Though by no means rich (and, besides, a father of six), he used his own money to publish it and mailed sixty copies of each issue to anatomists around the world. His most revolutionary finding was the utter lack of evidence for either axons or dendrites fusing and forming networks like those described by Golgi. He observed that, on the contrary, it seemed neurons did not need to touch to communicate. They only had to be contiguous for signals to be transmitted from one to the other. (The term “synapse”, used to describe the structure that permits a neuron to pass on its signal, would not be coined, by Charles Sherrington, until 1897.)
In 1906, Golgi and Ramón y Cajal were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and invited to share the stage in Stockholm. “The expectation was”, Finger writes, “that Golgi would talk about the stain that allowed scientists to see neurons better than ever before” and Cajal would “describe the studies that led him to neuron doctrine”. However, as soon as he stepped to the podium, Golgi began attacking the neuron theory (calling it “a fad already going out of favor”). Ramón y Cajal was, understandably, not exactly pleased by this attack on his ideas, but, unlike Golgi, he was gracious. He referred to the older man as his “illustrious colleague” and let time do its work.
Below, you can browse a number of Golgi and Ramón y Cajal’s beautiful illustrations of their findings — important depictions of the previously invisible branchings underlying our every thought and gesture.
For more of Cajal's wonderful imagery, also check out the 2017 book The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal.


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The Reverse of a Framed Painting, and Other Trompe L’oeil by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (ca. 1670)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Nov 5, 2020

On Easter Sunday 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys was bowled over by the ability of the Dutch painter Simon Verelst (1644-1710),
who took us to his lodging close by, and did shew us a little flower-pot of his doing, the finest thing that ever, I think, I saw in my life; the drops of dew hanging on the leaves, so as I was forced, again and again, to put my finger to it, to feel whether my eyes were deceived or no. He do ask 70l. for it: I had the vanity to bid him 20l.; but a better picture I never saw in my whole life; and it is worth going twenty miles to see it.

Around the time Pepys was poking the painting of Verelst, another northern European painter, Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, was also causing confusion with the brush, creating his masterpiece known as The Reverse of a Framed Painting (ca. 1670), an image that is, to modern eyes at least, his most striking.
Gijsbrechts was a master of trompe l’oeil, the technique of painting in which the painter tricks the viewer into perceiving that they are looking at an actual three-dimensional scene, rather than merely a representation of a three-dimensional scene on a flat plane. The name trompe l’oeil, or “deceive the eye”, didn’t come into use until Louis-Léopold Boilly showed a painting of this name at the Paris Salon of 1800, but the technique stretches back to antiquity. Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia gives a story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the fifth century BC competing as to who was the greater artist. Zeuxis’ painting of grapes is so realistic that birds swoop down to peck at them, but when Zeuxis follows a request that he should pull back the curtain covering his painting, Parrhasius’ superior skill is unveiled: the curtain itself is the painting, so cleverly rendered that it is indistinguishable from the real. Italian Quattrocento artists, with their interest in perspective, revived trompe l’oeil, and in the seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish artists built on their facility for still lives with further movement towards life-likeness. Gijsbrechts was among their number.
Born in Antwerp around 1625, Gijsbrechts criss-crossed northern Europe, eventually dying probably around 1675. He had a son, Franciscus Gijsbrechts, also a painter, with his wife Anna Moons, whom he married in 1648, although by 1659 he enlisted as a member of the Sodality of the Unmarried Men of Age. His biography at RKD, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, traces him from Regensburg, through Hamburg to Copenhagen, where he spent the period from 1668–1672 as a court painter, and where most of his remaining paintings can be found. Most of these, below, are from the collection of Denmark's Statens Museum for Kunst.
Gijsbrecht’s trompe l’oeil paintings depict some traditional objects: an impressively luxurious breakfast spread, a letter rack, falconry equipment, or two dead birds. A Cabinet in the Artist’s Studio includes within its selection of artist’s items a portrait that seems to be of Gijsbrecht himself. But it’s his The Reverse of a Framed Painting that is most unusual. SMK Curator Eva de la Fuente Pedersen explains:
When viewed from a distance we are genuinely fooled into believing that the artist has left a painting standing on the floor with its back turned outwards. As you approach the painting its deception is revealed. What appeared to be the back of a framed painting is actually the front of a canvas. The deception is evoked by means of shadows: the shadows cast by the decorative frame onto the stretcher; the shadows cast by the stretcher onto the back of the canvas, and the shadows cast by the small note and the nails. In order for the deception to fully work the painting should be placed so that its faux shadows are in keeping with the light sources available in the room in which it is placed.

Pedersen supposes that the painting was shown, amidst other playfully deceptive works, in the King’s Perspective Chamber which formed part of the Royal Danish Cabinet of Curiosities around 1700, when Gijsbrechts was in Copenhagen. More than 300 years later it continues to intrigue, striking us as a strangely modern work, in which we could see various prefigurings of later artistic movements. It partakes in, and simultaneously pokes fun at, figurative art. It hints at a fascination with the materiality of painting, the substance as the subject. There’s also something about the use of rectilinear lines to show us the reverse of an image which, albeit accidentally, somehow foreshadows a very modern obsession with the non-representational image (the “non-image”, if you will), as expressed so strikingly in Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and other subsequent abstract works of the twentieth century.


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Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Nov 19, 2020

“I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers”. So admits Thomas Wright in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). Written in the form of nine letters to a nameless friend, the book puts forwards “my Theory of the Universe, and the Ideas I have form’d of the known Creation.”
Although he was influenced by Comenius' pansophic theories of universal knowledge from a century earlier, Wright's theory of the heavens was strikingly original. Over the course of his discussions on the views of previous authors (illustrated in plate iii), the position and movement of bodies in the sky, and the implications for time, eternity and the soul, he was “the first to correctly postulate that clusters of starry nebulae were in fact galaxies too distant for us to discern clearly, and that the luminous blur of the Milky Way was simply an optical effect caused by our immersion in it”, as David Braffman explains in the Getty Research Institute blog: see Wright's Plate XXIX for his depiction.
This insight into the Via Lactea pre-dated Sir William Herschel and Caroline Herschel’s work in astronomy by two decades, and was an acknowledged influence on Immanuel Kant’s 1755 Universal natural history and theory of the heavens. It took Edwin Hubble’s photographs in the 1920s to offer proof of the nature of the Milky Way, and the telescope named after him continues to expand our fields of knowledge by use of images.
Born in County Durham in 1711, Wright became, to use the title of Judy Preston's contextualising paper in Garden History in 2010, a polymath in Arcadia, extremely well-versed in mathematics, sciences, and the arts, as well as an eminent garden designer. He has only one other published book, an introduction to the antiquities of County Louth, Ireland, but his diary, and other papers, are in the Special Collections and Archives at Durham University, where an exhaustive description of his life and works can be found. Not all his ideas were as well-founded as his work on the Via Lactea; in a manuscript sequel to An Original Theory, he proposed “that the sky was solid and studied with inward-pointing volcanoes down whose shafts we see the stars”.
The thirty-two “graven and mezzotinto” plates found at the end of An Original Theory  — printed “by the Best Masters” and likely based on Wright's drawings — reveal his remarkable range of vision. The most simple images show what Wright has observed in the night sky (Plate XVI), then diagrams of how these constellations (Plate XIX) and comets (Plate IX) are arranged and understood. From his empirical observations, and deductions about what this must mean for the relative positions and orbits (Plate XXII), Wright develops a much more ambitious proposal as to the construction of the universe. Plate XXVII depicts a globe within a globe, part of his hypothesis on the patterns and rules followed by bodies in space. It’s a hypothesis which culminates in his globular visions of the last two plates, which show full and section views of “the Object of that incomprehensible Being, which alone and in himself comprehends and constitutes supreme Perfection”. The extraordinary, endless eyes of the final plate (XXXII) give a good sense of Wright’s cosmic conclusion, that just as the solar system as we observe it is full of complex bodies, so too, but on a larger, parallel scale is the wider universe: an “unlimited plenum of creations”, all centred on the law and vision of God.
After a life of scientific discovery, adventure, and a career as a garden designer, Thomas Wright died in 1786. His observations and imaginations of his place in the greater scheme of things appear to have reconciled him to all “those little Difficulties incident to human Nature”. Presented with the immensity, and the visual richness, of space and the heavens, he concluded, “But here, even in this World, are Joys which our Ideas of Heaven can scarce exceed, and if Imperfection appear thus lovely, what must Perfection be”.
Featured below, all thirty-two of the illustrative plates, with their relevant description taken from the main body of the book. We've also made a few prints of the images which you can see in our shop here.


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French Silk Sample Book (ca. 1900)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Feb 16, 2021

First, grow yourself a mulberry tree... could be the first step in a how-to guide for aspiring silk weavers. Then you'd need a silk moth — preferably the Bombyx mori — of which each female will produce a clutch of four hundred or so eggs. From these the hungry silkworms hatch. After six weeks or so of leaf-eating, each larva is ready to make its cocoon, which it does by extruding through spinnerets (or, holes in the head) a liquid protein which solidifies on contact with air. Rotating its body in a figure-of-eight motion, the larva spins a single strand of silk of up to one hundred meters long, taking between three and eight days to encase itself.
As silk-maker, or sericultivator, you would next immerse the cocoons in boiling water to dissolve the gum holding their form, and extract the long, single thread from each. This can then be treated, dyed, spun, woven, and finished. It's an ancient process, with the oldest traces of silk found in China at Neolithic digs, and one with a rich history in France; Diderot and d'Alembert include instructions in the "Rural Economy" section of their Encylopédie.
Here, in the Mary Ann Beinecke Decorative Art Collection at the Clark Institute, Massachusetts, is a more recent example of silk production. It's a lovely French silk sample book, dating from between 1895 to 1905, consisting of 139 pages onto which are stuck small scraps of fabric. (The collection has similar books that present examples of embroidery, brocade, lace, and weaving patterns. See our previous collection post for another French sample book, of 1863, though that one collects watercolour copies of fabric patterns, whereas this example has the actual fabric.)
This silk collection is clearly a working tool of some kind — the pages are annotated, with what look like notes on the weight of the fabric, and names that might be designer, customer, or manufacturer? There are comments on the colourways, too, distinguishing between plain stripes in noir, marine, lido, or bordeaux, while the polka-dots come in a selection of names that are almost as pretty as the silks themselves: cyclamen violet, emeraude blanc, ciel bordeaux. There are woozy tartans, delicate chintzes, smart dots and stripes, Richter-esque roses, Missoni-style zig-zags. Below are some of our favourites; browse the whole sample book to find inspiration for your own, silky style.


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Don Quixote in the 20th Century (ca. 1905)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 9, 2020

“The course of events will tell, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote; “time, that discloses all things, leaves nothing that it does not drag into the light of day, though it be buried in the bosom of the earth. But enough of that for the present; let us go and see Master Pedro’s show, for I am sure there must be something novel in it.”—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, chapter XXV
These colorful chromolithograph postcards by the Spanish cartoonist Pedro de Rojas reimagine the adventures of Don Quixote for the twentieth century. We see the Knight of the Melancholy Countenance fighting with what appears to be a park ranger (the caption identifies him as the Knight of the Forest), entering a classy hotel with an umbrella under his arm, and jousting while riding in a motorcar.
The series of postcards closely follows the adventures of Cervantes’ Quixote, beginning with the gentleman reading too many books of chivalry in his study and proceeding through many adventures to his feverish death. Unlike other turn-of-the-century visions of the future's fashions, transportation, and social progress, here the twentieth century seems already retrograde: this Quixote may mount a hot air balloon to tilt at the windmills in his panoply, but little hints at industrialization, urbanization, or other contemporary shifts in modern life. Most of the scenery is nearly timeless: sparse rooms and country roads. It’s fitting that a seventeenth-century epic, about a man who imagines himself a medieval knight-errant, might struggle to find its place in the future, or de Rojas’ present. The postcards take part in a long tradition of illustrating the exploits of the hapless knight and his squire Sancho Panza — see our essay “Picturing Don Quixote” by Rachel Schmidt for more on the book's iconography through the centuries. And yet, the serial, keepsake nature of these chromolithographs make them equal parts illustration and ephemera, joining various quixotic curiosities that appeared in the period, such as this album for collecting image-laden candy wrappers that surrounded a Spanish sweet called “Caramelos del Quijote”, sold by the confectioner Matías López in 1900.
Born in Seville in 1873, Pedro de Rojas worked for several Madrid newspapers in his twenties before moving to Cuba in 1903 and, later, to Buenos Aires, where he died on September 4, 1947. In Argentina, de Rojas helped develop comics into a popular new medium for artistic expression. Comic strips first appeared in domestic papers around 1907 as importations from the United States. The second half of the nineteenth century had seen the rise of color magazines in Argentina, which — as one such periodical, El Mosquito, claimed — sought to provide caricatures “at the level of Charivari of Paris and Punch of London”. It was only natural, given the growing hunger amid a certain class of readers for social and political commentary, that comics slotted easily into these glossy pages. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, de Rojas declined North America’s influence on the form, choosing instead to draw on European traditions, cross established codes between text and image, and explore clashing subjectivities instead of a recurring protagonist’s plight. One of de Rojas’ most striking experiments, shared with us by our reader Lucas Nine, was a comic known as “Don Salamito y Doña Gaviota”. As Nine explains: “The novelty was how readers could choose, by mail, the names of the old couple that starred in the strip, actions for them to perform, and, eventually, the time and causes of their deaths, giving some interactive flavor to the thing.” Alongside his comics, de Rojas helped found the influential magazine La Vida Moderna in 1907, and provided illustrations for Caras y Caretas, the famous children’s’ magazine PBT, and Crítica, known for its sensationalist images, where he worked with prominent writers such as Jorge Luis Borges.


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Agostino Ramelli’s Theatre of Machines (1588)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 1, 2021

Instead of an e-reader, picture your favorite books on a portable Ferris wheel, a lazy susan of knowledge and imagination turned on its side. Supplement your jogging habit with a treadmill that literally mills, converting caloric expenditure into bread flour. Or flip another page to find: bandsaws and bellows powered by rivers; ecological cofferdams; and a fountain that uses hydrostatic pressure to sing the songs of birds, beckoning nightingales to preen beneath its spouting showers.
If this sounds like an Arcadian vision of the future, it is a future from the past. Agostino Ramelli’s 1588 Le diverse et artificiose machine (Diverse and artificial machines) features these devices (and about two hundred others) in an intricately illustrated volume. Published in Paris as a bilingual edition dedicated to King Henri III, the French and Italian tome has as much in common with literary texts as mechanical manuals. Ramelli’s designs gain their value not from practicality and efficiency (few were ever built), but from “classical gravitas”, visual imitations of the antiquity that Renaissance scholars and artists were busy rediscovering and, in turn, inventing.
A Catholic soldier who developed his mechanical prowess in the military, Ramelli trained with the Marquis of Marignano before moving to France to fight against the Huguenots. Equally devoted to mathematics and war, Ramelli included in his book what Witold Rybczysnki describes, in his history of screws and screwdrivers, as “a number of siege engines, cunning pontoon bridges that unfold like accordions, scaling machines, and monstrous catapults.” But Ramelli directs the most energy to the peaceful manipulation of water: dozens of devices for raising, diverting, and channeling aquatic bodies.
Despite the complex detail with which Ramelli draws and describes his inventions, the illustrations obscure as much as they reveal, evincing what Jonathan Sawday calls Renaissance writers’ “general love of concealment, hidden revelation, and secrecy”. Ramelli had good reason for not tipping his hand. In the introduction, his pen turns poisonous when describing how other inventors had “furtively robbed me of my special drawings”. While perhaps the most famous of his time, Ramelli was not the only Renaissance machinist. Aspects of his book resemble and influenced works by Giovanni Branca, Jacopo Strada, Vittorio Zonca, and Michelangelo.
Most prescient, perhaps, was his book wheel, which Megan Garber has called “the Kindle of the 16th century”. Borrowing the epicyclic gearing mechanism from astronomical clocks, Ramelli envisioned the machine to be of use to “anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout.” More impressive than its workings was the circular form — which some read as an anticipation of how printed and digital texts came to circulate globally — and its system of shelves, which work almost like web-browser tabs. Curiously, the revolving reader might be indebted to Chinese innovation, where similar machines appear in Buddhist temples during the sixth century. Joseph Needham, for example, believes that a description of rotating Ming “kiosques” found its way to Europe via Shah Rukh, son of Timur. Today, Ramelli’s device still retains fans: Anthony Grafton, Professor of History at Princeton University, supposedly has one in his office, and students at Rochester Institute of Technology built a historically-accurate replica in 2019 based on Ramelli’s drawings.


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The Sorceress by Jan van de Velde II (1626)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 29, 2020

This remarkable engraving of a sorceress mid-conjure is the work of Dutch Golden Age painter and engraver Jan van de Velde the younger. In Van de Velde's energetic and artfully arranged scene we see a young sorceress at work above a fire and, cavorting in its windswept flames, a motley crew of various demonic “familiars”. Amid the talons, wings, and characterful faces, there are pipes-a-plenty, with two notably placed up a demon's bum and streaming with powders in elegant arcs. The Latin at the base of the print gives a clue as to the meaning of the print, which seems to be a commentary on the perils of temptation:
“What evils Desire commands, in the small secluded place; who, by sweet incantation, overcomes the minds of the purest mortals, induces frenzy in everyone! But how quickly it slips by; Death overtakes brief life, brief delights. Laughing for a moment, in eternity suffering regret.” (Translation by Ross Caldwell.) The sentiment seems to be backed up by the presence of dice and cards in the foreground, symbols of the vice of gambling and fleeting pleasure.
While this image may meet our eyes today in a positive and almost joyful manner, behind there lies a much darker history. Between the years 1560–1630 Europe suffered its most intense and violent period of witch-trials. The Little Ice Age decimated crops and the impoverished found their scapegoat in the figure of the witch. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) added still more devastation and chaos into the mix. The year of this print's creation, 1626, saw the birth of some of the worst and most deadly witch-trials to occur in Europe — in Bamberg and Würzburg, and elsewhere in central Germany — which together led to the torture and murder of more than 1000 people (mostly women).
Related reading: our essay “Woodcuts and Witches”, in which Jon Crabb explores the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats — so familiar today.

author: Adam Green


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The Story of Napoleon’s Death Mask (1915)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 2, 2021

Who cast Napoleon Bonaparte’s death mask? Was it Francis Burton — Surgeon of the 66th Regiment of Foot and uncle to Sir Richard Francis — who searched for “gypsum by torchlight” to mix the plaster of Paris mold? Or François Carlo Antommarchi, the fallen emperor’s personal physician on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, whose boorish personality led his patient to figure him “an ignorant and unreliable bungler”? And might it be true that Madame Bertrand (attendant to the dying, dethroned king) annexed the matrix, barely dry, mashing its ears by crushing their helices into the conchae?
In the 1820s, Parisian elites loyal to Napoleon took quasi-religious pilgrimages to see this imperial relic’s many copies: the face of a man variously remembered as Commander of La Grande Armée, The Emperor of Elba, The Corsican Fiend, The Modern Hannibal, or simply as Boney. Bearing Napoleon’s likeness, the death mask inherited its subject’s complexities.
George Leo de St. M. Watson’s The Story of Napoleon’s Death Mask (1915) examines the scholarship surrounding the cast’s creator and finds an atmosphere “so charged with invention, calumny, innuendo, scandal, bad blood, espionage, and so forth, that even the robust inquirer is gradually and unconsciously demoralized”. Engorged with bons mots and brimming with pith, the investigation, in its author’s own words, moves between “the hot sword-play of polemic” and “the chill spade-work of research”.
But both sword and spade are closer to cudgel. Regarding Antommarchi’s suspicious, delayed assertion (seemingly timed with Burton’s death) that he himself was sole creator, Watson compares the admission to how one might “in middle age bethink himself of some smart waistcoat sported in adolescence and fetch it from a cobwebbed trunk to see if it still fitted!” Regarding a dubious wax version of the cast, Watson thinks that nothing “more grotesque and more preposterous” exists in Napoleonic iconography, a phiz he quips to be about as human as Melpomene, the mask of tragedy. The only solution can be inebriation on the part of its possessor: Capt. Winneberger of the Bavarian army. “No doubt the monstrosity was moulded in wax one night by a slashed and salted young Fuchs”. This would explain why it conjures “the prosopomorphic quart-pot of a Munich beer-cellar, minus the handle, snapped off in student’s row!” Watson’s fondness of exclamation is rivaled only, perhaps, by Napoleon’s penchant for conquest.
Why the controversy? Aside from the ambiguity of origin story, the death mask shows little sign of disease for a man who (supposedly) died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-one. And it lacked the “Attic features”, “morose Roman gravitas”, and “stony, Sphingian stare” that steadily crystallized in Napoleon’s portraiture as he ascended the alpine heights of fame. Complicated by the statesman’s belief that it is not “the exactness of the features, a wart on the nose which gives resemblance. . . [but] the character [of great men] that dictates what must be painted”, the death mask’s incongruencies disturbed nineteenth-century phrenologists. An ancient practice, funerary casting’s apex “correlates with the rise of a modern culture of celebrity across the watershed of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries”, writes D. Graham Burnett, as well as public interest in physiognomy (the attempt to discern moral character in facial characteristics) and phrenology (the attempt to map the correlation between psychological qualities and the shape of a cranial surface). According to Watson, Napoleon’s death mask led experts in the latter field to declare that the skull “had not the bumps or the bony development requisite for a hero”. Little Boney indeed.
Funerary casting faced its own Waterloo not long after Napoleon’s death. With the popularization of photography and cinema, celluloid film became the new index of reality. And it’s easier to take a snapshot than to rub a corpse with inspissated oil and other unguents. But the lore around Napoleon’s reliquary lives on: what Watson calls the mysteries of “those more recondite organs”, lopped during the autopsy and smuggled to Corsica. For better or worse, Watson himself left behind neither a mask nor much of a biography to go on.


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George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Oct 29, 2020

While the word “zombie” first appears in English as far back as 1819, in poet Robert Southey’s History of Brazil (as the Angolan word for deity/spirit), it wasn't properly introduced to Western culture until William Seabrook’s sensationalised accounts of Haitian voodoo cults in The Magic Island (1929). It is the slave plantations of Haiti which are usually identified as the birthplace of the zombie concept, where enslaved Africans responded to their conditions by developing practices of voodoo, and a belief in a dead body that could be reanimated and controlled. Of course, the idea of the walking dead can be seen as distinct from Haitian traditions, and in Western culture predates Seabrook — see for example H. P. Lovecraft's 1922 horror story “Herbert West–Reanimator” —  but it was The Magic Island's vivid descriptions of “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life” that seemed to really capture the twentieth-century imagination, in US cinema in particular. A spate of zombie-filled films followed: Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932) (starring Bela Lugosi) and its sequel Revolt of the Zombies (1936), Jean Yarbrough's King of the Zombies (1941), and Jacques Tourneu's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), to name a few. These were all films that played, to various levels of crudeness, with the Haitian voodoo stereotype. But it perhaps wasn't until George A. Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead — made out-of-hours on a shoe-string budget by the then 28-year-old director — that the lumbering undead took the form so familiar today.
Though Variety magazine labeled it an “unrelieved orgy of sadism”, Romero's vision has proved enduringly popular, and hugely influential on a subsequent genre of cinema that constructs social satire through horror. Director Jordan Peele has celebrated its influence on his 2017 hit Get Out, a film which is treated to an excellent reading, or viewing, by Zadie Smith on the appropriation and theft of pain, of artistic subjects, and of living and near-living bodies.
In addition to its late-show popularity, Night of the Living Dead has prompted plentiful, more cerebral examination. New York's Museum of Modern Art is proud to have picked up on the film's high-art virtues as early as 1970, while zombies will cement their place in academia with the forthcoming George A. Romero Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Romero’s zombies emerge within various strands of academic thought. It’s not just the presence of protagonist Ben, a Black man among white fellow victims, whose death has lynch mob overtones, but the figure of the zombie itself, that gives Night of the Living Dead an important presence in Black Studies. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon traces a history of “zombie biopolitics” back to origins in the Caribbean plantation, while Kaiama L. Glover in a short presentation recognises the figure as embodying anxieties about those from the global south who might threaten “us”, “here”. In a related field of study, Céline Keller’s article does a good job of situating the zombie within a history of philosophy, cyborgism, and transhumanism.
Romero himself couldn’t be kept down; he followed Night of the Living Dead with Dawn, Day, Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead. It’s a film and a concept that — like its monstrous subject — has a tendency towards survival. But why did such an enduring artwork emerge just when it did? The zombies in Night of the Living Dead are irradiated, and this was, after all, still the age of nuclear anxiety – the previous year, 1967, had seen the US record its highest total of stockpiled nuclear weapons. It was also the height of civil unrest in the US. MoMA’s take on the film is that:
Released at a time when disillusionment was running rampant in the country — spurred by the Vietnam War and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy — Americans identified with the film’s most shocking suggestion: death is random and without purpose. No one dies for the greater good or to further the survival of others. Instead, people die to feed faceless, ordinary America.
Some might see parallels with own age of pandemic and ecological crisis. As Jon Towlson’s 2018 introduction for the British Film Institute notes:
Night of the Living Dead takes us into the apocalypse almost in real time. . . . The effect is to create a very powerful sense of a definitive point of change: we see the precise moment that history collapses.
The collapse of history is a powerful and (most would say) depressing image, but perhaps one not entirely devoid of life — there seems to be something extricating itself from the wreckage, stretching out its arms towards us, drooling…


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Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 2, 2021

“There should always be a pretty centerpiece”, instructs Sarah Field Splint in The Art of Cooking and Serving, a Depression-era etiquette guide that greased the rails for Crisco shortening's steady slide into the American home. During Margaret Atwood's 2006 short story named after Splint's book, her preteen protagonist weighs decoration against utility. “The charm of my centrepiece would not however cancel out the shabbiness of our paper napkins”. Mattia Giegher's 1629 Trattato delle piegature (Treatise on folding) offers an elegant solution to the young girl's quandary: nix the centerpiece and fold your napkins into finery worthy of display.
Giegher's Trattato appeared as part of Li tre tratatti (1629), joining his earlier works on meat carving (Il trinciante) and stewardship (Lo scalco). While we crease modern napkins as an entrée to the main task — a lap dam for gravy, say, or neck-tucked against crustacean spray — Giegher's creations were never meant for dabbing. These were starched objets d'art.
During the fifteenth century in northern Italy and southern Germany, technical knowledge of the mechanical arts (think: crafts, machinery, and culinary recipes) began to appear in vernacular writing. “Why around 1400 did artisans take up pen and paper with such gusto?” asks Pamela H. Smith about these early modern how-to guides. Her answer involves war technologies, state power, and urban, cultural exchange. Come the seventeenth century, with literacy on the rise in pockets of Europe, the proliferation of manuals on carving, table service, and, in Giegher's case, napkin folding suggests a widening interest in knowledge once exclusive to the princely domain.
Born sometime around 1589 in Moosburg, the Duchy of Bavaria, Giegher (né Matthias Jäger) moved to the Republic of Venice to study the arts of the dining table. Soon he Italianized his name and used a professional epithet: “carver to the German nation in Padua.” An expert at dismembering animals, the Trattato proved that Giegher could also resurrect them in broadcloth bestiaries. After a brief introduction to the art and its stakes, Giegher turns to illustrations of his technique and the resultant finery. In the first images, we see a pair of disembodied hands at work on the herringbone shape, a pleat that lends its name to his napkin animals (“animali di spinapesce”). From the initial fold quickly follows the finished creations: pheasants, the winged Lion of Saint Mark, and a “mer-dog” (un cane “ma con la coda di pesce”). Like the creatures themselves, some of Giegher's folded fauna seem (almost) impossible.
The first treatise on napkin folding, Giegher's Trattato is an important example of the wider  tradition of trionfi da tavola (triumphs of the table), arcane creatures and architectural abstractions crafted out of napkins, glass, wood, wax, and tragacanth. Published as oblong quarto, a format usually reserved for musical scores and sewing patterns, his Trattato reflects the influence of tailoring and anticipates the later art of Troublewit, paper animated by accordion folds, as well as ornamental orange peeling.
It would be easy to dismiss this napkin craft as trifling. The diarist Samuel Pepys fantasized about paying a practitioner to teach his wife the art because he liked it so much. But modern “virtuoso of the fold” Joan Sallas, who has recreated several of Giegher's trionfi, reminds us that these objects had Sinnbilder: symbolic meaning in German baroque. Folding professionals “were trained not only in technique and artistry, but also in culture and the humanities, including recurrent themes like heraldry and mythology.” Nuremberg once housed an entire school devoted to the art. All the same it was often servants, those “silent familiars of early modern households”, who practised the craft on a daily basis. In Giegher's manual, as Deborah L. Crohn writes, “their hands were allowed to speak with an eloquence that belied their status”.


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The Music of the Waters: A Collection of Sea Shanties (1888)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Jan 19, 2021

We don’t know much about Laura Alexandrine Smith, except that she lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, where her father was Russian vice-consul, and that she was — as evidenced by this wonderful collection of sea shanties and their surrounding culture — an exemplary ethnomusicologist. As a writer, she was clearly interested in the anthropological aspects of musical genres (her second book looked at Gypsy music) and here in The Music of the Waters her focus is on the song-bellowing sailor, whether a Nile boatman, Venetian gondolier, Indian rower, or Dutch herring-fisher.
With its roots in a series of articles commissioned by The Shipping World, Smith subsequently grew the book out into a delightfully rich compilation — for each song collected there's a musical score, lyrics, alternative versions and translations, as well as the song's history, contextual background, and the activity that the song was designed to accompany. She also includes, as the final chapter, a section on superstitions and legends relating to seas, rivers, and lakes.
It is a delightful mix of rich literary scholarship and, what we might now call, immersive research. “She has personally gone”, as R. M. Ballantyne (author of copious maritime adventure tales for children) says in his Introductory Note, “straight to the 'fo'c'sle,' and interviewed the sailors not only of her own, but of other lands, and thus has gathered from the men's own lips, and from their manly voices, the words and melodies which are most popular among them.” Of particular note for Ballantyne was Smith’s willingness to “beard the lion in his den”, in interviewing the denizens of this mainly masculine, and extremely harsh, work environment. Not that the shanties were exclusively male — alongside “Whiskey Johnny”, “Blow the Man Down”, and “Married to a Mermaid”,  Smith’s collection includes Russian and Gaelic chants sung by women as they crushed the grain on the wharf, previous to loading the vessels with it.
Work is, of course, a dominant theme throughout the book and its songs, and it is worth reminding ourselves that seas shanties differ markedly from sea songs in this respect, as a recent JSTOR Daily piece highlights. Smith concurs. For her it is rhythm which is central to the shanty and its relationship to work. While they might accompany a wide range of different activities — including hauling, capstan work, and pumping — rhythm is central to all of them, so as to coordinate the labour of groups.  She specifies, “here is the true singing of the deep sea — it is not recreation, it is an essential part of the work”.
Below you can browse other collections of maritime working songs, none so comprehensive or as international in reach as Smith's, but certainly worth a browse and maybe a sing.


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A Book of Stone: Adam Wirsing’s Marmora (1776)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 10, 2021

“Marble is a brilliant material”, exclaims the art historian Michael Greenhalgh, while listing the stone’s admirable properties: beauty, solidity, polish, and the ability to endure. Without this stately rock, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Parthenon, and Taj Mahal would have decayed to dust long ago. From the Greek word for “shining stone”, marble illuminates the past by letting it stay visible. And the words we use to distinguish its types are almost as lustrous as the thing itself. Calacatta, Talathello, Carrara, Levadia, Makrana . . . and more.
“There are few productions of the natural world that exhibit a greater variety of kinds or species than marble”, wrote a correspondent for The Monthly Review in 1776, praising Adam Ludwig Wirsing’s Marmora et adfines aliquos lapides coloribus suis exprimi (Illustrations of marble types and some related stones). An engraver, art dealer, and limner, Wirsing published his book in Latin and German, adopting the Latinized sobriquet of Adamicus Ludovicus for the occasion. Though born in Dresden, he focused on his adult environs, the area surrounding Nuremberg, and worried less about aesthetics than authenticity. He produced his guide to “banish the confusion, and prevent the frauds, that take place in this branch of natural history”.
Today, Wirsing is best remembered for the quiet elegance of his illustrations. Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to stone. In some, the patterns look like landscapes in miniature, abstract anticipations of artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who shared Wirsing’s marbled pallet. Squinting at other squares, marble’s limestone origins appear preserved within the vivid plates: archaic lifeforms, transformed under geological pressure, swirling and circling just out of sight. Long after the last copy of Wirsing’s Marmora crumbles between a careful reader’s fingers, his object of study will remain unfazed, graceful, and awaiting rediscovery.


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Greek Masquerade (1771)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Nov 12, 2020

The shepherdess and shepherd, the bride and groom, the priestess and monk, and the sutler and grenadier: these are the characters of the Mascarade à la Grecque, a parade of fantastical, architectural outfits from the imagination of French artist Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801), who appears himself in the final image in the guise of a bespectacled architect.
Although Petitot was indeed Court Architect at Parma from 1753, these designs — etched and published by Benigno Bossi — are, of course, neither plans for buildings, nor sketches for actual garments. Rather, the Mascarade is Petitot's way of poking fun at the prevailing fashion for the goût grec, or “Greek taste”, that flourished in France in the 1750s. A reaction to the ornamental excesses of the Rococo style, the goût grec ushered in the neoclassical style, and is characterised by forms such as acanthus leaves, pilasters, Ionic scrolls, and meander patterns. Petitot takes this style to a ridiculous extreme, in which humans and their clothing morph into objects: shoes become bricks, elbows in sleeves are angled pediments, the sutler's stomach is her oven. This application of the goût grec into the human body is Petitot's take on fashion gone mad; it's his badinage, his little joke, as he explains in one introduction to the designs.
Petitot's Parma was a Francophile centre for decorative arts, under the influence of the Marquis of Felino. In other versions of the Mascarade at the Cleveland Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Marquis is the dedicatee, but by the LACMA version pictured here, the avis explains that in order not to "harm his modesty", his name has been removed from the dedication. One suspects that the Marquis' impending fall from Hapsburg favour might also have played a role in this change.
The Met's version of the Mascarade appears in a volume along with other collections of Petitot's designs for vases and fireplaces. You can compare his plans for a vase held by lions, with its translation into a tangible object in ormolu and porphyry, auctioned by Christies.  Petitot's Mascarade costumes, in contrast, were never meant to be realised. As curator Femke Speelberg says in her two-minute video for the Met's 82nd & Fifth series, the images in the album are ”masterpieces of ingenuity that display the human inclination towards fantasy”.