text:
Reading Like a Roman
Vergilius Vaticanus and the Puzzle of Ancient Book Culture
By Alex Tadel
June 30, 2021

How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.

Texts of Greek and Roman literature do not usually come down to us in lavishly illustrated editions dating back to what we term classical antiquity. The vast majority have been preserved either in relatively contemporaneous papyrus fragments, which are of major historical value but aesthetically rather underwhelming, or much later copies. The manuscript known as Vergilius Vaticanus is one of only three manuscripts from Graeco-Roman antiquity which preserve illustrations in more than a few scraps. An invaluable rarity dating back to around 400 CE, the Vaticanus is the oldest of the three.1
The name “Vaticanus” denotes the location where the manuscript has been kept since 1600 (the Vatican Library) and not the site of its production, though it was most likely made in Rome. “Vergilius” points to the texts copied in the document, which preserves portions of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid. At a glance, the former is a didactic poem about agriculture; after a focused read, it becomes a complex web of mythological, political, and philosophical material. The latter, Virgil’s seminal creation and Rome’s national epic, relates Aeneas’ escape from Troy and his quest to find a new home for his people. The texts are accompanied by beautiful illustrations depicting carefully choreographed scenes framed by a border of intense red.
The canonical classical texts — Oedipus Rex, Medea, the Aeneid and the like — enjoy continuing universal recognisability. But the materiality of texts in ancient Greece and Rome, and the reading culture in which they were created, remain relatively obscure. How, why, when, where, and who read what are questions the answers to which can usually only be reconstructed from tiny scraps of papyrus or offhand remarks by classical authors. The exceptional state of preservation in which the Vaticanus has come down to us — full folios rather than loose strips of papyrus — makes it perhaps the oldest remnant of Graeco-Roman reading culture a modern observer can think of as a “book”. Although it dates from the very end of classical antiquity, its familiar appearance makes the Vaticanus a convenient starting point from which to explore the fascinating, and, to a modern eye, quite alien world of classical books.
The Preservation of Papyri
While the Vaticanus is the oldest source for the texts it contains, we would still have the Georgics and the Aeneid if we didn’t have the Vaticanus. Like the vast majority of extant classical texts, the works of Virgil are known to us through significantly later copies. There was a continuous Byzantine tradition of copying Greek as well as Latin texts; Arab scientists adopted and significantly enriched Greek medical writings; Christian monks in the territories of the former Western Roman Empire habitually copied authors whom they perceived as the principals of Latin literature.2 As Virgil was the undisputed centre of this clique, we have innumerable manuscripts preserving his works.
But there is another source for classical texts, studied by the relatively new and dynamic field of papyrology. In the late nineteenth century, a boom of archaeological excavations brought to light hundreds of thousands of papyri, flooding the previously negligible field with so many fragments to repair, decipher, and interpret that the work is still in progress. One of the most substantial papyrological sites was discovered in 1896 in Egypt near the remains of a Greek town called Oxyrhynchus. The curious name means “sharp-snouted”: Greek for the Nile fish that was worshipped there by Egyptians. Oxyrhynchus was a flourishing town, though little of its architectural remains have been excavated. What has been of tremendous interest since 1896 is the ancient city’s rubbish dump, where the dry Egyptian climate has preserved innumerable papyri (mostly in Greek), thrown there by people who no longer had any use for them.
In more humid climates, papyri have long since disintegrated, and most of the finds we have from elsewhere were likewise stored in comparably dry areas. Others were preserved by exceptionally hot conditions. In Herculaneum, for example, the eruption of Vesuvius carbonised an entire library, turning the scrolls into compact and extremely fragile blocks, essentially frozen in time by fire. Early attempts to unroll and read them often resulted in the scrolls disintegrating; recently, scholars have been trying to read them using X-ray technology. The library seems to have contained mainly Greek philosophical texts.
Papyri excavations in Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere have unearthed innumerable literary works previously unknown from manuscript traditions. To list just a few: an entire comedy by Menander, a playwright previously known only from brief citations in texts by other authors; substantial portions of a satyr play by Sophocles, one of only two satyr plays of which we know more than a few lines; and multiple fragments of Sappho, the lyric poet from Lesbos. It’s not just scraps of discarded papyrus salvaged from a rubbish dump that have proven to be invaluable. Greeks and Romans used a variety of writing materials, and such precious pieces of literature as a previously unknown poem by Sappho have come down to us scribbled on ostraca — pieces of broken pottery.
Papyri (and potsherds) are most often found in quite a sorry condition. They are torn, discoloured or in pieces, and even when reassembled usually still have large lacunae. In comparison with these, the Vaticanus is in an excellent state of preservation. Another difference between most classical textual finds and the Vaticanus is the format — the late Vaticanus is a codex rather than a roll. The codex is basically the type of book we still use today: folded sheets (of paper, parchment, or papyrus) held together at the spine. This results in a two-leaf display which is simple to navigate — flicking forwards and backwards to find a particular passage is relatively easy. In comparison, the roll was awkward and inconvenient — only a narrow portion of the text could be seen at a given time, and a search for a passage consisted of time-consuming rolling and unrolling of the scroll. Around 400 CE the codex became the norm for classical texts, and the Vaticanus may have been one of the first copies of Virgil to take advantage of the convenient format.
Pagan Parchment
The Vaticanus was made from parchment of the highest quality. The expensive material and the fine execution of the miniatures make it clear that this was a luxury edition for a member of the Roman elite. A very simplistic (though still persistent) conception of the fall of ancient Rome may lead one to see the Vaticanus as one of the last relics of classical culture and refinement soon to be replaced by the darkness and ignorance of medieval Christianity. It is true that the time of its making — around 400 CE — coincided with the ever more adamant efforts by the Church to suppress pagan religion. In the late fourth century, the emperor Theodosius banned all forms of pagan worship, including private rituals. It is possible that the Vaticanus was commissioned by a pagan noble determined to preserve one of the most important texts of their ancestral culture, full of descriptions of strange rituals and blood sacrifices. But it is equally possible that it was made for a convert to Christianity.
Just as their pagan predecessors, most late antique Christians, and especially the learned clergy, admired the staples of Greek and Roman literature, among which Virgil held absolute primacy. Nevertheless, to make the explicitly pagan Virgil more palatable and to enhance the glory of the new religion, the quintessential pagan poet was transformed into a kind of Messianic prophet. His Fourth Eclogue, written around 40 BCE, described the birth of a saviour child who would mark the start of the golden age — it is easy to see how this could be reinterpreted to fit Christian mythology. Besides, Christians often found the evidently pagan elements in Virgil such as sacrifice intriguing rather than in need of censorship. Explanations of pagan rituals formed lengthy passages in medieval commentaries, suggesting that paganism was perceived with the curiosity which attracts us to bygone, distant phenomena. The Vaticanus may well have been owned by a Christian who appreciated the texts for their artistic value.3
Reading (in) Antiquity
The Vaticanus was undoubtedly a prestigious edition made for a wealthy client, whether pagan or Christian. But we know that the Aeneid was known far beyond such elite circles, as graffiti from Pompeii quoting (and mocking) it testify.4 How widespread was reading for leisure then? Where did people get books? What did they look like? There is little doubt that there was a thriving book culture in ancient Greece and Rome, but as the evidence is often anecdotal, biased, or highly specific, it is difficult to get the full picture. Even while the puzzle of antiquarian book culture remains unsolved, the following few pieces are absorbing enough on their own.
Plato testifies that already by the turn of the fifth century BCE, one could buy popular works of philosophy at the Athenian agora for a relatively low price of less than a drachma — one drachma was the average daily wage at the time.5 Greek papyri from Egypt, which start to appear about a century later, show us that the demand and desire for non-luxury copies in the Greek-speaking world was continuously high. Literary texts were found on the backs of papyri formerly used as official documents, which suggests that they were copies made for people who could not afford fancy papyrus. Works by Athenian authors were found in faraway, difficult to access desert towns. Even if most of these copies were made in an educational setting, we cannot completely dismiss the possibility that at least some people found deciphering a scroll — with no spaces left between words — an agreeable enough pastime.
When it comes to Latin texts, we have less contemporary evidence in the form of papyri, but much more information about their readership from the authors themselves. Latin authors, to a greater extent than the Greeks, liked to write about their books and their literary success. These discussions paint a picture of conflicting impulses towards elitism and popularisation.6 To begin with the former, Horace is representative in advising aspiring authors to be happy with just a few select readers. In a dedicatory address to his own new collection of poems, he personifies the work and compares its desire to be read by as many as possible to prostitution.7 The content itself of a great portion of Latin texts was somewhat inaccessible. This was highly allusive, learned literature, the enjoyment of which was greatly enriched by one’s ability to recognise and appreciate its sophisticated intertextuality.
On the other hand, the wish to be popular, which Horace projects onto his personified  poems, might be the author’s own desire to see them widely read; the poems’  longing to be displayed at the booksellers’ stalls in the Forum is their author’s  excitement in anticipating the publication of his work. This kind of pride in popular success contrasted with snobby pretensions, and seems often to have prevailed in the most diverse authors. Cicero, the self-important politician, wrote that the number of people reading his philosophical works was far greater than he had expected. Martial, a more lighthearted poet, nonchalantly presented himself as a universally recognised and admired celebrity, and stated that everyone in Rome read him.8
Scattered Fragments and Future Glory
It is hard to determine to what extent either the elitism or the popularity were mere wishful thinking. What is certain is that the works of Horace, Cicero, Martial, and many others were continuously considered worthy of copying by a sufficient number of people that they survived until the present day. The power of texts to give eternal life to their author was a perennial theme of classical literature, but the longevity they actually enjoy may well have exceeded these authors’ wildest expectations.
The potential of poetry not only for self-immortalisation, but also for promoting politically advantageous visions of past, present, and future was not overlooked by the brilliant propagandist Augustus. Poets under his patronage presented a vision of history as a fateful trajectory culminating in his rule, a narrative which legitimised and exalted his subversion of the republic and assumption of imperial power.
The Aeneid was one such work, narrating as it does the Augustan version of the grand destiny of Rome. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, flees his burning city and after a lengthy wandering brings his people to Italy, where their descendants will found a new Troy — Rome. Rome’s future dominion, sanctioned by gods, will have no spatial or temporal limit. The nation will reach its peak in Augustus, whose reign will usher in the golden age promised to Aeneas. This teleology is made explicit in Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld in the company of the Sibyl.9 There Aeneas is shown a procession of future kings and notables of Rome, and told of their achievements — Aeneas needs this display of his people’s future glory to boost his ever-faltering motivation to continue his journey. The absolute apex of the procession is Augustus, who will conquer distant lands, bring peace at home, and lead the way to the golden age.
The Aeneid, however, is not a simplistic piece of propaganda. The heroic epic is continuously complicated, most evidently in the flawed character of its superficially exemplary protagonist. The very act of imagining a glorious history and a timeless empire is questioned, modified by an awareness of the fragility of memory, transience, and unpredictability of the future. Even a well-functioning memory can be dangerous, represented by the unforgiving Juno, or paralysing, exemplified by the nostalgic Aeneas, while distorted, fragmentary, interrupted and elusive moments of remembering feature prominently in the Aeneid.10 Attempts to control or interpret the future are just as fragile, as embodied in the Sibyl’s scattered prophecies. She writes prophetic verses on leaves and carefully arranges them in her cave. When the wind blows in, it scatters them through the cavern, and the Sibyl makes no attempt to put them back in order.11
Every text is liable to fragmentation, corruption, or misinterpretation. The Sibyl’s fragmentary prophecies offer partial glimpses into the future, while we in the present day are left to reconstruct the past from pieces of papyri. Even the Aeneid, the grand Augustan epic, is to an extent the result of reconstruction. We do not have the original manuscript Virgil wrote, and the later ones we do possess present us with different versions of the text. Textual critics carefully select the most likely variants for present-day editions of the Aeneid, but the original text will never be recovered with absolute certainty. As far as the Vaticanus is concerned, the care and reverence that went into its making were mostly invested in the lavish illustrations rather than the text, as was often the case with luxury editions. Relatively little attention was paid to the correctness of the copy, and later versions are usually considered more faithful to the original Virgilian manuscripts. Even though the Vaticanus is our oldest source for the Georgics and the Aeneid, its chief interest undoubtedly lies in the illustrations.
In Miniature: From Scroll to Codex
While the images preserved in the Vaticanus date from antiquity, they are still four centuries after Virgil’s day, and so provide a somewhat belated, anachronistic vision of what a classical Roman illustration tradition might have looked like. But with the help of the Vaticanus we can surmise how other, earlier editions  appeared. There was a fixed iconography in Roman book illustration — just as scribes copied the text, so illustrators copied models provided by earlier manuscripts. Based on the style of military dress in the Vaticanus, it is possible that the model for its miniatures dates back to the first half of second century CE.12 Sometimes illustrators conflated earlier models and combined several illustrations within a single frame, which could result in awkward overcrowding. A single illustration in the Vaticanus represents three episodes: a wounded deer flees to its mistress, who in distress cries for help; Allecto, an Erinys, sounds the war call to turn the ensuing quarrel into a fight; a fierce battle follows. As the artist tried to fit the three scenes into the available space, the menacing Allecto was reduced to a tiny, barely noticeable figure.
In the Vaticanus illustrations, the entire surface circumscribed by the red frame is filled in. The minimalistic backgrounds, which represent little more than the basic outlines of the landscape and the sky, are nevertheless carefully painted, soft pink shading into pastel blue. The heavy frames and coloured backgrounds could only be executed in the codex format. In a roll, such large surfaces of paint would lead to the pigments flaking off. If the Vaticanus is the first codex in the tradition of illustrations it belongs to, it is likely that the frames and the backgrounds were added by the Vaticanus painters, with only the figures inherited from earlier models. In these earlier rolls, small illustrations would be inserted at the appropriate point in the columns of text.13
Unfortunately, few examples of this system of illustration survive in Graeco-Roman literary papyri. The ones we have suggest that illustrations in scrolls could be much more casual than in late antique codices like the Vaticanus. Illustrations in what is known as the Heracles papyrus — preserving portions of an unknown poem about the hero — appear to have been drawn with quick, informal brush strokes. The result strikingly resembles a hastily sketched modern comic. The Charioteer papyrus probably comes from a codex but preserves the scroll style of illustration without backgrounds or borders.14 Its charioteers are much more finely executed than Heracles. They form a dynamic, expressive group dressed in the colours of the factions of the hippodrome. There were blues, greens, reds, and whites, each of these attracting a loyal following not unlike sports teams do today.
Just as the Vaticanus was based on earlier models, so the medieval manuscript style that followed in its wake built on, transformed, and adapted models it found in late antique documents according to its needs. While no medieval manuscript appears to preserve the Vaticanus tradition of Virgilian illustration, late antique codices in general shaped illumination practices in the Middle Ages. This influence was so ubiquitous that it often went undetected. A peculiar example of this process is the false etymology of the word “miniature”. Far from implying the smallness of an illustration, the expression derives from the Latin word for red lead (minium), which was used to paint the signature red borders in codex illustrations. The word remained in use even as frames gradually started to be done in other colours, and became erroneously associated with the minute character of medieval illuminations.
If the line separating the classical from the medieval is already hard to draw in Western European manuscripts, the distinction becomes even hazier if we move eastward. The still persistent westernising distinction between the classical and the medieval — which sets the boundary in 476 CE, when Odoacer deposed the final Roman emperor — glosses over the continuous Byzantine political and cultural tradition. Byzantine scholars copied works lost in Western Europe, only to be rediscovered there when these scholars brought their collections to Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These scholars’ contribution was not just in mechanical copying, but also in the critical compilation and interpretation of classical texts.
As a product of very late antiquity, the Vaticanus lets us think beyond the habitual contrast between the classical and the medieval. Tales of total overhaul in 476 CE, of the unbridgeable gulf between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages seem naïve and simplifying. The lines of descent linking the late Vaticanus to earlier manuscripts — and its influence, in turn, on (lost) medieval copies — invite us to see patterns of continuity, transferral, adaptation, and development, alongside instances of fragmentation, loss, and oblivion. While the Vaticanus is the oldest surviving illustrated Roman manuscript we have, it is hardly the last relic of a dead tradition. It is part of a continuous culture of reading stretching far beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of what we term classical antiquity.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Alex Tadel


text:
Picturing Scent
The Tale of a Beached Whale
By Lizzie Marx
July 21, 2021

What can visual art teach us about scent, stench, and the mysterious substance known as ambergris? Lizzie Marx follows a “whale-trail” across history to discover the olfactory paradoxes of the Dutch Golden Age.

Foul Omen
During the seventeenth century, whales, of various species and sizes, were washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. Sometimes the creatures were already seized by decay; other times, they were beached alive, bellowing deafening groans while being crushed by the sheer weight of their own bodies. While they decomposed, gases would build up, sometimes culminating in a fetid explosion. If the tide did not sweep away the whale, a long and arduous process followed, in order to break down the mass and clear away the site.
The colossal creatures attracted onlookers who were fascinated by the spectacle, and among the throng were artists, who, armed with drawing requisites, recorded what they saw, and what they smelled.1 Jan Saenredam depicted a sperm whale that beached on December 19, 1601. The whale is stranded on its side, showing its underbelly to the coast. Hordes of visitors congregate around the swollen cadaver and clamber over its body to inspect it. The descriptive border further details the state of the whale, picturing its gaping mouth on the left, and its back on the right, which has been split open, pouring out tresses of entrails. Positioned near the whale’s mouth, Saenredam pictures himself recording the cadaver on a sheet of paper flapping in the coastal winds. At the scene’s centre is Count Ernest Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, military leader and nephew of the stadholder Prince Maurice of Nassau. In his left hand is a lavish tasselled handkerchief, elevated to his nose to block out the stench.
The Latin verses that foot the print, written by the Dutch writer and poet Theodorus Schrevelius, evoke the fetor, reading:
Its formlessness, its opening running deep into its innards,And its mouth, from which fluid and great quantities of blood flow.2
In addition to the entrails that are pictured tumbling out of the whale’s mouth and back, the print exudes a foul atmosphere. Faced with the whale’s pervading stench, the Count’s handkerchief appears futile.
The whale was, according to Schrevelius, a monster; not only for its terrifying stature, but because it was believed to be an omen. Monsters were by definition the messengers of future catastrophes, as monstrum, monster in Latin, meant both a monster, in the modern sense, and a portent.3 The whale’s warnings manifested within days of its arrival, when there was a solar eclipse on December 24, 1601. It was followed by an earthquake nine days later, and by a lunar eclipse on June 4, 1602. The ominous events play out in the print’s heavy border.
In 1618, the engraving was reworked, to illustrate another calamity that struck the Dutch Republic after the whale’s arrival. Beneath the top border, emerging from the clouds, is Death, a skeletal figure whose arrows shoot down a winged woman. The shield of three crosses identifies her as the Maid of Amsterdam. Death presided over the city in 1601–02 during an outbreak of plague, and the print suggests that the sperm whale’s arrival was its prophet.
Early Modern medical theory asserted that disease spread through the odours emitted from stagnating and foul matter. In the wake of another outbreak in the Dutch Republic between 1667–1669, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher’s volume about the plague, Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur, was translated into Dutch from Latin. He reported that the causes of the plague included cadavers, foul air, and rotting whales washed up on the shores.4 Perhaps the invisible pestilential emissions from the whale could stretch further than the coast, and insidiously seep into the cities. The Count’s handkerchief takes on a new, ominous layer of significance in the second version of the print. Indeed, he holds his handkerchief against the awful smells of decay, but also as protection from the pestilential fumes.
An Olfactory Paradox
While the plague descended on Amsterdam, there lay an olfactory paradox deep within the whale’s bowels stranded at Beverwijk. When undigested squid beaks irritate the intestines of a sperm whale, it can produce an exceptionally fragrant substance, known as ambergris. The mass can grow over years until the sperm whale either expels it, or it ruptures the intestine, eventually breaking free from the body. The substance gradually rises to the ocean’s surface, and with exposure to salt water and sunlight, its olfactory composition changes from an abhorrent faecal stink, to the beautifully formed, alluring fragrance of ambergris.5 The grey mass of ambergris may spend years at sea before it is washed up on land, where it becomes perfectly camouflaged on a stone beach.
In Early Modern Europe, the source of ambergris remained an enigma. Ambergris might have been food for whales, or it was considered to have come from an underwater island, or from the mud of mountains; or it was honeycomb that had fallen from rocks by the sea, or the aromatic excrement of East Indian birds, whose diet of fragrant fruit and insects was believed to give the ambergris dung its delightful smell.6 The Wittenberg scientist Justus Fidus Klobius was partial to the avian theory, and his volume dedicated to ambergris illustrates four of the sea birds occupying a rocky landscape among the buzz of insects. A kneeling man harvests the excrement, and near the sea, another ambergris gatherer searches for further deposits. No less than eighteen hypotheses for the origins of ambergris are listed in Klobius’ volume, all of which remained inconclusive for more than a century.7
Great fortune came to those who discovered ambergris. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a botanist working for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), describes encountering an unimaginably large piece in his book on natural history. Towering at nearly six feet, the lump was acquired by the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC in 1693 from the King of Tidore (the Moluccas), fetching an estimated 116,400 gilders, roughly €1.13 million today.8 The accompanying illustrations make no allusions to its potent fragrance, but they keenly observe the ambergris’ craggy, marbled, sinuous topography.
Ambergris was often acquired out of a desire to fragrance and flavour. It graced the breakfast table of Charles II, King of England, where it was scattered on scrambled eggs up until his death in 1685, when the potency of the seasoning masked the suspect poison that allegedly killed him. Half an ounce of finely grated ambergris constitutes the Dutch recipe for Amber-Podding, a hedonistic potpourri of lard, almonds, sugar, white bread, musk (a fragrant secretion from the musk deer), and orange blossom water, cooked with the ambergris in pig’s intestine.9 In addition to flavouring food, the substance impregnated leather goods, to sweeten the foul residues from the tanning process. In Saenredam’s scene, the visitors who spectated the beached sperm whale at Beverwijk are warmed by leather gloves and fur muffs, which probably lingered with the scent of ambergris. Standing before the beached whale, the visitors come face-to-face with their decomposing perfumer.
The potency of ambergris was thought to make it resistant to maladies. Early Modern medical theory asserted that while malodorous matter could harbour disease, fragrant substances could protect the body. Ambergris is included in incense recipes to fumigate the home, and added to decoctions of sweet waters, to rid the body of pestilence. One of the most beguiling pieces of plague protection is the pomander, a pendant that held fragrance. The name comes from the Latin pomum ambrae, apple of ambergris, as a primary component in the pomander’s composition was the sperm whale’s perfume. Various scented balms were once stored in the six compartments of this luxurious silver segmented pomander. Ambergris probably mingled with cinnamon, rosemary, cloves, and other aromatics. Some pomander recipes called for amber, the fossilised tree resin that was distinct from ambergris, but whose fragrance was also associated with warding off disease.10 To the Early Modern nose, ambergris was one of the defining scents of plague protection. The rotting cadaver in Saenredam’s print illustrated the source of Amsterdam’s troubles, and, paradoxically, deep within its bowels, where fragrant ambergris dwelled, was its solution.
Smeared Oils on a Flat Surface
Some decades after the beached whale foretold the fate of Amsterdam, visitors in the city came to admire the latest works by Rembrandt van Rijn in his studio. As Rembrandt’s biographer Arnold Houbraken recounts, when visitors edged closer to the paintings, the artist pulled them away, saying, “The smell of the paint would irritate you”.11 Oil paint combines pulverised pigments with linseed oil, a sharp-smelling binding medium which is extracted from pressed flax seeds. The compound produces a wonderfully supple and jewel-like paint that can achieve fine details and varying textures. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, he does not use oil paint sparingly, but practically sculpts with it. He smears out flesh-coloured oils to construct his nose, and in order to evoke the folds of his headpiece, he scrapes out lines of blue and yellow paint revealing the dark ground beneath. In the studio, the odour of linseed oil must have been a disruptive force, and Rembrandt used it to persuade his visitors to distance themselves from the painting, to best behold the rough, impasto slicks of paint. The painting has retained most of its lustre, but the odour, in time, has faded.
To truly triumph over the odour of paint, it was believed that an artist needed to create works that captivated the viewer, so much so that the studio’s astringent atmosphere was rendered imperceptible. Almost twenty years before Houbraken wrote about Rembrandt’s studio, the artist and critic Roger de Piles remarked that a poor work would, “smell always of the Pallet”.12 If a work of art did not do enough to stimulate the viewer’s imagination, the scents of reality would creep in, and the painting was reduced to some smeared oils on a flat surface. But perhaps De Piles’ aphorism came with exceptions. An encounter with a still life of rotting fruit may not have drawn the viewer’s attention back to the studio. Rather, through the odour of glistening oil, their imagination could be roused, and the sharp scent of rot brought to life.
An abundance of scents could be discerned in paintings. With microscopic precision, artists depicted the materiality of the Dutch Republic’s exhaustive inventory. Allusions to odours can be seen through landscapes, grand history paintings, scenes capturing daily life, and portraits. They are diffused from little coal fires and bubbling pots, humorously excreted, and exuded from stagnating matter. Scattered among artworks is the paraphernalia devoted to fragrance: clay pipes, snuff boxes, pomanders, chatelaines, sweet bags, nutmeg graters, incense burners, teapots, apothecary jars, fans, gloves, and illustrious fragranced centrepieces. In Saenredam’s print, it was the whale’s spilling guts and the Count’s handkerchief that inferred an odorous atmosphere. Through recording the visual in works of art, the olfactory was made known, and the viewer’s imagination was stirred.
A Bone on a Building
The whale trail concludes at the Town Hall of Amsterdam, rendered precisely by Pieter Saenredam, whose father Jan had witnessed the monstrous whale at Beverwijk more than half a century earlier. Although the Town Hall had burned down years ago (Rembrandt drew its smouldering ruins), Saenredam painted the scene from memory, using some of his earlier sketches to detail the pastel structures with tufts of weeds, crumbling stonework, and idly swaying shutters, as well as little figures wandering down the street and resting beneath the arcade. It is on the arcade of the vierschaar, the High Court of Justice, that a thick bowed whale rib can be seen shackled above the left arch. The source of the rib is unknown, however it was already fastened to the façade when Jan Saenredam beheld the stranded sperm whale in 1601.13 Even before the whale landed at Beverwijck, the monsters had made an impression on Amsterdam.
Whale bones could often be found prominently displayed on public buildings. In 1577 the tail and lower jawbone from a stranding of sperm whales were hung in the hall of the High Court of Holland in The Hague, as an eternal memorial.14 And when the merchant Jan Huyghen van Linschoten returned from his voyage to Nova Zembla in 1596, he presented a whale’s jawbone to the City Hall of Haarlem, to display and commemorate the curiosity.15 While the whales had gone through a lengthy process to be stripped of their former selves, their bodily presence could remain through residual visceral odours. The skeleton of a whale that landed in Livorno in 1549 was displayed in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. However it was not long before the display had to be dismantled. Within the bones, the marrow had advanced its decay, and it exuded an intolerable stench.16 Whalers in the seventeenth century attempted to moderate the smell by drilling holes in the bones to drain it of fluids, but with little success.
How the whale rib must have roused the imagination, to dwell on the beast that swallowed Jonah, to marvel over the vastness of God’s creation, or to conceive of the thrashing creatures that the whalers harpooned in the Northern settlement of Spitsbergen. So too might it have conjured up stories of the strandings on Dutch shores. Were the bone at the Town Hall to emit the scent of decomposition — for sources withhold the details — the mind’s eye of the beholder could restore flesh to the whale, and drift in thought to the beach where its counterparts decomposed.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Lizzie Marx

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Petrified Waters
The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond
By Laura Tradii
May 5, 2022

Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance and their reception abroad, illuminating how these curious spaces transformed across the centuries.

For centuries after their appearance in Renaissance Italy, artificial caves were staples of garden architecture across Europe, and the subject of much fascination. Far from being mere kitsch divertissements, or uninventive copies of natural caves, grottoes existed at the crossroads of multiple traditions. Classical mythology, Arcadian idylls, occult speculation, and an interest in cultural curiosities coexisted in the grotto, allowing for the playful exploration of a new tension emerging between Nature and Artifice. Understanding the grotto’s popularity in Italy and beyond requires unpicking the wondrous universe that was conjured by these complex garden features. Their symbolic vocabulary evolved over the centuries, from a Renaissance model of the cosmos, where the mutable shapes of grottoes offered a chaotic counterpoint to the formal grace of gardens, toward a Romantic staging of the Sublime, accessed through increasingly naturalistic replicas of caves.
Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that, in ancient Greece, caves dedicated to deities and divinities were decorated with inscriptions and statues.1 Greek mythology frequently figures natural grottoes as the abodes of nymphs and other (sometimes dangerous) beings. In the Odyssey, for example, both the cyclops Polyphemus and the nymph Calypso inhabit caves that imprison Odysseus — the former by force, the latter with enchantment — while Homer’s description of the naiads’ lair on Ithaca led Porphyry, the third-century Tyrian philosopher, to declare with awe how “in the most remote periods of antiquity, [caves] were consecrated to the Gods”.2 Replicas of such places, later referred to as nymphaea (singular: nymphaeum), became part of the urban infrastructure in ancient Rome, where they served as monumental exedras housing public fountains.3 Through both their sacred and mundane forms, artificial grottoes provided “a means to create and manipulate the most precious element — water — to regulate and recycle it, to worship and display it”, writes Naomi Miller.4 The symbolic association between divine nymphs, caves, and aqueous bodies was reprised in the Renaissance, when garden grottoes, usually supplied with running water, were coveted among the wealthy families of Europe. The frenzy began in Italy, where aristocrats, merchants, popes, and cardinals started to incorporate grottoes into their gardens and palaces.
In his monumental 1615 treatise L'Idea della Architettura Universale (The Idea of a Universal Architecture), architect Vincenzo Scamozzi described fountains in what he called “grotto porticos” (Grotti Portici), which could be found “below and above the ground”, and were decorated with “pebbles [and] tuff and other materials petrified in various shapes of nature. . . and then decorated here and there with niches, with statues of stone and sometime of metal”.5 Elsewhere he points to a “cryptoporticus underground” at Tivoli’s Villa D’Este, with “various fountains which murmur loudly”. He instructs that “grotto-porticos, so called because of their resemblance with caves [grotte], shall be in fresh and shaded places”.6 They should not receive much light, and their “ornaments shall be fountains, niches, and tableaus with statues, inscriptions, and such things”. “The Ancients would [decorate them with] extravagant and ridiculous paintings . . . . And because such paintings were found in some places [resembling] caves, for this they call them grottesche.”7
Here, Scamozzi is referring to the grotesques or grottesche, fanciful and often humorous decorative motifs that became ubiquitous in the Renaissance, both in the creation of grottoes and as a wider visual style, after similar motifs had been discovered in the cave-like, underground ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea. The frescoes of Domus Aurea depicted ornate extravaganzas of harpies, festoons, plants, and masks, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses — a poetic collection of classical myths and legends narrating the transfiguration of humans and gods into plants, animals, and more. A major influence on Renaissance literary and visual arts, Ovidian metamorphosis manifested in this period’s garden grottoes too, where visitors encountered a mysterious universe of mutable forms and half-petrified, often amphibious creatures.
While varying in shape and form, grottoes tended to share a few common features. First, niches or vaults, evoking the curved ceilings of natural caverns. Second, the movement of water, ranging from simple mechanisms (trickling down rocky walls) to the elaborate and ornate (musical automata).8 Third, and most importantly, rugged, “rusticated” surfaces, imitating the uneven texture of stone, and sometimes featuring icicles or stalactites. In The Lives of the Artists (1550), Renaissance artist and historian Giorgio Vasari dedicates a brief chapter to the practice of beautifying fountains with “various rustic things” as well as incrustations of “petrified waters” from which condensation would drip.9 He also describes rustic grottoes in which vegetation sprouts on “spongy rocks”, where what “appears disorder[ly] and wild” is made to appear “more natural and real”. Stalactites were only one of the many decorative possibilities, and grottoes were often adorned with artfully arranged shells, corals, pebbles, mosaics, or paint. Statues of nymphs, tritons, dolphins, and other amphibious creatures emerging from rocks were common, and the algae and moss growing on these surfaces would enhance the fusion of natural and artificial elements. Rather than aiming to accurately represent caves in naturalistic detail, many grottoes reinterpreted the Roman nymphaeum, with or without a distinctly cave-like space. Take for example a creation at Villa di Mondragone in Frascati. While conceived as a “grotto”, it is far from resembling a cave.
In the sixteenth century, artificial caves became a status symbol in the gardens and palaces of Italy’s wealthier classes, who invested significant resources to provide their abodes with grottoes and nymphaea.10 This was the case, for example, with Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este who hired architect Pirro Ligorio to design the gardens of his Villa D’Este, earning Scamozzi’s praise. The gardens boasted numerous grottoes and water games, and soon became a major attraction: images were circulated in countless drawings, prints, and etchings, doing much to popularise the Italian garden across Europe.
In Villa d’Este and beyond, grottoes were more than mere water features providing freshness and shelter from the heat of Mediterranean summers. They were also embedded in complex symbolism and meaning-making. Renaissance gardens were conceived as models of the cosmos, places where the tension between Artifice and Nature — and the triumph of the former over the latter — could be explored and staged.11 With its multimedial dimensions, the grotto enabled and embodied the encounter between the natural and human-made worlds. If gardens represented an ordered cosmos, in which Man played the role of Creator, grottoes animated a primigenial, subterranean world where “elements . . . coagulate into changing forms”, enabling contemplation regarding the mysteries and origins of life.12
With this emphasis on primordial, fluid forms, it is not surprising that amphibious creatures like the nymphs featured so prominently in grotto decoration. Their liminal status between the divine and human realms, liquidity and solidity, and their potentially dangerous sexual lure made them particularly suited for the mysterious and mutable aquatic universe conjured by grottoes.13
The contemplation of nature’s variety was also reflected in the grotto’s decoration with rare and precious materials. Burnished with lavish arrangements of mother-of-pearl and corals, some grottoes were similar to Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosities that were becoming popular in the homes of wealthy European families.14 And like in these cabinets, the encounter between nature and art was explored and celebrated with automata, playful masterpieces of ingenuity.15 In Villa D’Este, water-powered birds sang in the grotto-like Fontana della Civetta (Fountain of the Owl). Inside a nymphaeum in Frascati’s Villa Aldobrandini, a fountain represented Mount Parnassus, with figures forming a musical symphony.
A number of grotto designs for hydro-powered musical automata are also illustrated in Salomon de Caus’ Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes (1626), where Orpheus-like figures tame wild animals with wind and string instruments. Depictions like these were a favourite motif because their arcadian themes suited idyllic gardens, recasting what Miller describes as “the mysterious, numinous, and erotic” associations of the classical grotto.16 Musical machines were also popular in “water theatres” (teatri d’acque). Villa Aldobrandini, for example, had a number of rusticated niches with statues, each of which produced different sounds, timbres, and water displays. One fountain of Atlas produced “whirlwinds of waters, with thunder”,17 while, in others, Polyphemus and centaurs play wind instruments, as a deluge drenched “those who climb the stairs”.18
The performance-like aspects of nymphaea betray the importance of the theatre, a major influence on Mannerist garden architecture, in the design and mechanics of grottoes.19 Intermezzi — extravagant theatre and dance performances between the acts of plays — relied on elaborate machinery, stage sets, and props. As in artificial caves, writes Gordon Campbell, they privileged “pastoral, mythological, and allegorical scenes”.20 And indeed, grottoes and their associated aesthetics and paraphernalia figured prominently in such intermezzi. Consider for example this intermezzo, one of the many staged to celebrate the wedding of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589. In the words of contemporary Bastiano de’ Rossi:
the scene was all covered in sea cliffs, and the stage became a rolling sea, surrounded by those rocks, which looked like mountains [in ruins], among which . . . crystalline fountains gushed. . . . [A] niche in the colour of mother-of-pearl began emerging from the sea, five arms long, and pulled by two dolphins which, moving in leaps (as dolphins do in the sea) spouted scented water. . . . Once all the niche had emerged from the water, one could see [sea goddess] Amphitrite sitting in it, dressed of a garment so [tight], and so similar to the colour of skin, [that she looked naked].21
Sequined with corals, nacre, and various “maritime jewels”, Amphitrite was followed by a cortege of nymphs and tritons. The latter creatures’ heads were covered in bushy “light blue hair, and garlands of marsh reeds” from which, “as they began to emerge”, “abundant water” “rained down their face”.22
With its elaborate mechanisms, rustic mountainous surfaces, corals and pearls, gods and sprites covered in vegetation, this intermezzo deploys the symbolic and iconographic repertoire of the grotto. And the intersections between garden architecture and the theatre were seemingly limitless. Renaissance stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti planned the grottoes of the Boboli Gardens, which can still be visited today in Florence, as well as the park of Villa di Pratolino, home to some of the most famous caves and automata of the time. The French philosopher Montaigne, who toured the garden during its construction, found himself ambushed by the mischievous waterworks: ※※Indexed under…FountainsMischievous
At one single movement the whole grotto is full of water, and all the seats squirt water on your buttocks; and if you flee from the grotto and climb the castle stairs and anyone takes pleasure in this sport, there come out of every other step of the stairs, right up to the top of the house, a thousand jets of water that give you a bath.
Although little of the original garden survives, the park of Pratolino is known to this day for the grotesque Colossus of Appennino, a gigantic figure that symbolises the surrounding mountainous region.23 A masterpiece of Renaissance sculptor Giambologna, the Colossus, covered in artificial encrustations, was hollowed out on the inside to contain fountains and a network of grottoes painted with scenes of “shepherds, mining, and metallurgy”.24 The presence of this gigantic, grotesque figure amid a formally poised Italian garden highlights how Renaissance gardens were at once, writes Luke Morgan, “places of pleasure and peril, order and confusion”.25
From the gardens of Italy, the grottoes travelled far. Wealthy tourists, inspired by their visits to Italian villas, copied these designs in their gardens back home, often adapting and reinventing them to suit local tastes. In France, for example, one of the first grottoes was built in the palace of Fontainebleau as early as the 1540s. The Grotto of the Pines resembles a portico, its façade supported by rusticated telamons imprisoned in stone pillars.26 The grotto fashion spread in Germany too, resulting in a multitude of diverse designs. The Castle of Heidelberg’s garden, Hortus Palatinus, boasted several grottoes (designed, like the aforementioned automata, by Salomon de Caus).27 In Potsdam, the New Palace (built between 1763 and 1769) had a Grottensaal (Grotto Hall), an imposing, vast room decorated with multicoloured marble and thousands of shells. The majestic Hall could not be more different from the luminous Neptune Grotto — a rococo gem, located in the gardens of the palatial complex.28
While grottoes and nymphaea remained popular through the Baroque period, evolving sensitivities in garden design, and sea-changes in the philosophical conception of nature, altered the appearance of artificial caves. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the English landscape garden, which preferred a naturalistic emulation of the countryside’s variety over formalised designs.29 As a character laments in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play centred on the transformation of an Italian-style garden into the English vogue: “By 1760 everything had gone — the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes” — the whole geometry of the garden “ploughed under by Capability Brown.”30 Indeed, the primacy of the “picturesque” in these English gardens meant that grottoes receded from the fore to join a wealth of other features (temples, hermitages, bridges, follies, statues), artfully disposed across the landscape to construct pleasing views. The inner marvels of the grotto were no longer the main event. In this new context, as Naomi Miller writes in her seminal Heavenly Caves, the grotto “became a symbol of the forces of nature, or a retreat to spur lofty poetic sentiments”.31
This new treatment of the grotto is evident in William Wrighte’s delightfully titled Grotesque Architecture : Or, Rural Amusement, Consisting of Plans, Elevations, and Sections, for Huts, Retreats, Summer and Winter Hermitages, Terminaries, Chinese, Gothic and Natural Grottos, Cascades, Baths, Mosques, Moresque Pavilions, Grotesque and Rustique Seats, Green Houses, &c . . . (1767).32 While little is known about its author, this successful pattern book provides insights into how grottoes were refashioned to suit the English landscape.33 Consider the design for a “Rural Grotto”, which Wrighte’s caption suggests should be:
built of large rough stones rudely put together, so that the building may as near as possible imitate the beautiful appearance of nature. If the dome was to be richly ornamented with pendentive shell and frosted work, it would look very elegant. In the middle niche is Neptune on a rock, pouring out water, which descends under the pavement through an arch, and forms a running stream. The side niches are ornamented with satyrs and other grotesque figures. The situation should be in a morass, near some water.34
While this grotto still presents itself as a rusticated portico, its inclusion in a catalogue alongside hermitages and shepherd’s huts reframes it as a rural retreat. Here the emphasis is not so much on the decoration of grottoes with natural ornament, but on their harmony with the surrounding landscape. This is underscored by the building materials suggested by Wrighte for the various designs, which now include “large rough stones”, “rude and irregular flints”, as well as “irregular rude branches and roots of trees”, like in the “Rustic Seat”. Wrighte’s enclosures have much more in common with garden follies: those eye-catchers that dotted English landscape gardens, often “in the form of a sham ruin, a Classical temple, oriental tent, Chinoiserie pagoda”.35
Around the same time William Wrighte published his Grotesque Architecture, one of the most famous grottoes in the world, or rather its valuable content, underwent a transformation emblematic of the aesthetic shift away from the Renaissance grotto. The Grotto of Thetis in the Versailles gardens, completed in the 1670s, boasted a majestic centrepiece: a statue of Apollo bathed by the Nymphs. Decorated with precious stones, enamels, and mirrors, it punctuates a narrative arch that traced the daily journey of the sun, rising from the Basin of Apollo in the Versailles gardens and setting in the Grotto of Thetis. The marvels of the Grotto of Thetis were short-lived, however, and the building was demolished just a decade later to make place for the extension of the château’s north wing. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the preserved Apollo centrepiece found a new home as part of an English-style garden at Versailles designed by painter Hubert Robert — in a grotto framed by artificial cliffs, cascades, and greenery. Now housed within bare and rugged walls, and to be experienced at a distance, the scene’s aesthetic value lay not in precious and elaborate interiors, but rather in the interaction between the statues, cave, and their surrounding landscape.
This shift towards more naturalistic-looking caves reflected the influence of Romantic aesthetic sensitivities. These were characterised by a preoccupation with mankind’s insignificance before grandiose natural phenomena, eliciting a “sublime” sense of awe and terror that sparked artistic inspiration and creation. If Renaissance grottoes had toed the line between playfulness and mystery, it is the latter that took hold in this period, as gardens at large became enveloped in an aesthetics of ruination, melancholy, and sublimity. Artifice — in particular as mechanisation and automation — acquired increasingly negative connotations for distancing mankind from the idyllic state of nature. Automata, which had been so prominent in Renaissance grottoes, fell from favour, and were thought of as disquieting, uncanny, and even demonic.36
With their dark, mysterious interiors and craggy walls, caves figured prominently in Romantic art and literature, and naturalistic grottoes were therefore particularly suited to elicit “sublime” feelings. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), “all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy . . . darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light”.37 The affecting potential of subterranean environments was exploited in the garden of Villa Pallavicini, located in Pegli (Genoa, Italy). Inaugurated in 1846, this English-style Romantic garden was the brainchild of Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini (1800–1871), an aristocrat, politician, and mason well-versed in esoterism. Here a Romantic sensitivity fuses with the theatricality and occult symbolism that once populated many Renaissance gardens. The architect Michele Canzio, stage designer of the Carlo Felice theatre, arranged the landscape as a circuit of spiritual transformation. At the end of the itinerary, dedicated to Catharsis, the visitor must navigate through pitch-black caves before emerging in a paradisiac grove with a temple rising from tranquil waters.
Amerigo Gassarini, Canzio’s contemporary, described the experience of entering the caves:
Let us bravely enter in . . . this cave, where thick darkness surrounds us, scarcely transfixed by the weak rays which penetrate through the rare openings in the ceiling. . . . Which mortal could have arranged with such artfulness the natural stalactites which decorate in enormous masses [en masses énormes] the grand vaults of this cave? – Bizarre . . . calcarean formations are piled up above our heads; and because it must be acknowledged that Man . . . arranged them this way, we must not forget that we have, under our eyes, the slow and progressive work of past centuries.38
Gassarini narrates hearing “the sinister lapping of water” and feeling “the almost complete obscurity which reigns in this place.”39 While boating in the caverns, visitors could contemplate the interiors as well as “the infinite price that this grotto must have cost to Monsieur Marquis Pallavicini”.40 At this point in the narrative, it becomes hard to hear Gassarini’s irony — or its lack. Emerging into the light, the visitor is struck “by all the magnificence of the tableau which, all of a sudden, unfolds under our eyes”, prompting the writer to wish he could sing “an hymn in honour of Nature and Art, which held hands to make us experience the most delightful emotions”.41
Villa Pallavicini, and Gassarini’s description and illustration, vividly conjure the continuities and disparities between Renaissance and Romantic interpretations of the cave. Despite changes in their designs and symbolic underpinnings, grottoes remained for centuries places where the tensions between Artifice and Nature could be experienced, whether through the surprising symbiosis of playful automata, lavish shellwork, and morphing forms in Renaissance gardens, or through the awful, sublime powers of nature, as staged in the otherworldly darkness of Villa Pallavicini’s caves. While grottoes eventually fell from favour in garden architecture, this complex history — and the layered symbolism adorning the walls of artificial caves — remind us that a rich cultural universe lies beyond the grotto’s contemporary status as a “kitsch” or “bizarre” curiosity.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Laura Tradii


text:
Re-examining “the Elephant Man”

By Nadja Durbach
July 24, 2013

Nadja Durbach questions the extent to which Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, was exploited during his time in a Victorian “freakshow”, and asks if it wasn't perhaps the medical establishment, often seen as his saviour, who really took advantage of Merrick and his condition.

The scenes are among the most heartless in cinema history: a drunken, abusive showman exhibiting the severely deformed Joseph Merrick to horrified punters. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with its lead character being treated little better than an animal in a cage. But it soon finds a clean-cut hero in the ambitious young surgeon Frederick Treves, who rescues the hapless Merrick from his keeper and gives him permanent shelter at the London Hospital. Supported by charitable donations, the victim recovers his humanity: he learns to speak again (in a decidedly middle-class accent), to entertain society guests and to dress and behave like a well-heeled young dandy. Merrick, no more the degraded show freak, reveals his inner goodness and spirituality and dies happy.
Lynch’s movie is based largely on Treves’ sentimental chronicle. But that narrative is merely one version of events — and one that in the end tells us more about middle-class morality than it does about Merrick. There is another story that casts a different light on what happened. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager, are surely as biased as Treves’. But as one of the most respected showmen of his day, Norman’s account challenges head on Treves’ claim that Merrick was ultimately better off in the hospital than at the freakshow.
In August 1884, after checking himself out of the Leicester workhouse, Merrick began his career as “the Elephant Man”. The exhibition of human oddities had been part of English entertainment since at least the Elizabethan period. In the 1880s, alongside the Elephant Man, the British public could see Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, American Jack the Frog Man, Krao the Missing Link, Herr Unthan the Armless Wonder and any number of giants, dwarfs, bearded women and other “freaks of nature”. Despite the freakshow’s popularity, by the end of the 19th century, middle-class morality was condemning it as immoral, indecent and exploitive.
Most Victorian freaks, however, actually earned a comfortable living. Many were free agents who negotiated the terms of their exhibition and could ask for a salary or a share of the profits. They sold souvenirs to the crowds to make extra money. The freakshow was thus an important economic resource for working people whose deformities prevented them undertaking other forms of labour. Indeed, freak performers did not consider their exhibitions to be obscene or degrading. Rather, they saw themselves as little different from other entertainers.
Merrick suffered grievously from a rare disfiguring disease. His limbs were severely enlarged, and his massive head sprouted a large bony lump. His skin was loose and hung in sack-like masses from his back. A small “trunk” that had been cut away from his upper lip was beginning to grow back. He was, recalled Treves, “the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen”. But at the age of 22, Merrick’s decision to exhibit himself as the Elephant Man was a rational financial choice.
During the two years he was on display in Europe, he was able to save more than £50 — a sizeable sum for a working-class man. In fact, Merrick earned more from his exhibition than his manager. They shared the take evenly, but Norman paid for the rent of the venue, food and lodging.
According to his manager, Merrick was happy with his life as a show freak, and of the workhouse he had quit, he declared: “I don’t ever want to go back to that place.”
This was no surprise. The Victorian workhouse was the place of last resort. Poor food, squalid living conditions and the penal atmosphere were all intended to discourage the poor from being a burden on the state. Indeed, most working-class people sought desperately to avoid the physical hardships and social stigma of the workhouse. Norman recalled that Merrick “was a man of very strong character and beliefs — anxious to earn his own living and be independent of charity”. He refused to pass a hat around at the end of the show to collect extra, insisting that “we are not beggars are we, Thomas?” The freakshow provided Merrick with a way to earn a decent living in a manner he found less degrading than relying on poor relief.
When the Elephant Man’s show was shut by the police in December 1884, Merrick left for a continental tour. But two years later, he returned to the East End of London destitute, having been robbed of his savings by an unscrupulous showman. Treves had exhibited the Elephant Man to the Pathological Society in 1884 as a puzzling medical specimen and had given him his business card. When Merrick produced the card on arrival at Liverpool Street station, the police summoned the surgeon to intervene on his behalf. Motivated by scientific curiosity and compassion, Treves admitted Merrick to the London Hospital. He raised funds for his upkeep through a campaign in The Times to prevent what he considered the immorality of the Elephant Man’s public exhibition.
In the hospital, Merrick was kept largely confined to his rooms. When he ventured too far outside them, he was quickly shepherded back, lest he frighten other patients. Treves said his intention in providing for Merrick was to save him from the humiliation of public exhibition. However, his charge was constantly visited by curious members of high society. Like the masses who attended freakshows, they came out of a prurient fascination with Merrick’s grotesque body rather than merely to “cheer his confined existence”. Indeed, as a patient with a rare disorder, he piqued the curiosity of a variety of medical practitioners and was frequently on display. According to Norman, Merrick was “constantly seen and examined” by a “never-ending stream of surgeons, doctors and Dr Treeve’s (sic) friends”.
The Elephant Man’s hospitalisation sprang from a benevolent desire to help this “poor fellow”. But, for Merrick, it may have been little different from entering the workhouse. As a permanent resident, supported entirely by charitable donations, he was rendered a dependent member of “the deserving poor”. Norman argued that Merrick’s “only wish was to be free and independent”. This could not happen while he remained an inmate of the hospital where, his former manager argued, he must have felt as if “he were a prisoner and living on charity”. Treves maintained that Merrick was “happy every hour of the day”. But Norman’s son unearthed the testimony of a hospital porter who claimed that Merrick asked more than once: “Why can’t I go back to Mr Norman?”
Merrick never returned to the show world. Instead, he lived out his days in renovated basement rooms at the London Hospital, where he was found dead, lying across his bed, at 3:30pm on April 11 1890. Although no foul play was suspected, the coroner felt it prudent to hold an inquest. He concluded that Merrick had died of natural causes — that the weight of his head overcame him during sleep and caused suffocation. Treves supported this interpretation. He argued that Merrick’s death resulted from his “pathetic but hopeless desire” to sleep “like other people”. Norman, however, had a different interpretation of Merrick’s death. He believed the Elephant Man had taken his own life.
Suicide does seem a much more plausible explanation. Merrick was found dead in the middle of the afternoon, and thus not during a natural sleep. He was lying in a position that he knew would cause asphyxiation.
The Elephant Man’s skeleton remains on display in the London Medical College’s pathological museum, a fate he clearly expected. According to one of Treves’ medical students, he “used to talk freely of how he would look in a huge bottle of alcohol”. Norman also continued to exhibit Merrick’s “body” after his death, displaying a bust of the Elephant Man in his waxworks. But when he sold the exhibit after the first world war, he kept hold of the bust and stored it away in a packing case. Merrick continued to be exhibited, therefore, in both of the venues that had made him famous.
Ironically, it was the sideshow, rather than the scientific institution, that finally laid the Elephant Man’s body and memory to rest.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nadja Durbach


text:
Still Booking on De Quincey’s Mail-Coach

By Robin Jarvis
February 20, 2013

Robin Jarvis looks at Thomas de Quincey's essay "The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion" and how its meditation on technology and society is just as relevant today as when first published in 1849.

In the last quarter of 1849 Thomas De Quincey published two separate essays in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a leading Tory periodical. These two essays, entitled “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” and “The Vision of Sudden Death,” were revised and amalgamated five years later to produce one of the author’s most memorable and idiosyncratic pieces. “The English Mail-Coach” is at once a celebration of that form of transport and an elegy for its demise, since by the time De Quincey published his essay the railways had already spread across the country and shunted the mail-coach into the sidings of history. As an exercise in technology nostalgia, therefore, the essay might be compared to someone recalling fondly the brick-like mobile phones of the 1980s while necessarily using a modern, lightweight smartphone and perhaps grumbling at the way it increasingly dominates their waking life.
“The English Mail-Coach” is in four parts. In the first, De Quincey explains his fascination with mail-coaches and recalls his delight in using them — insisting always, against the grain of class preference, on an outside seat — to go to and from Oxford in his student days. He relates his obsession to the pleasures of unprecedented speed, with the thrill of “possible though indefinite danger”; the visual stimulation of “grand effects,” as deserted roads at night are momentarily lit up by coach-lamps; the sheer spectacle of “animal beauty and power”; the sense of participating in a great national system, akin to a living organism; and the additional excitement of bringing news, good or bad, from the battlefront (during the Napoleonic Wars) to local communities far and wide.
In the second section of the essay, “Going Down with Victory,” De Quincey elaborates on the adrenalin-fuelled experience of bearing tidings of war, kindling joy all along the route “like fire racing along a train of gunpowder,” and describes the more ambivalent experience of giving one woman a partial account of the “imperfect victory” at Talavera, a costly battle in which her son’s regiment has, he believes, been virtually wiped out. In the third section, “The Vision of Sudden Death,” he narrates an incident at night on the Manchester-to-Kendal mail in which the coachman nods off and, with De Quincey seemingly unable to seize the reins and take evasive action, the vehicle narrowly avoids collision with two lovers in an oncoming gig. It is only the young man in the gig who can avert disaster, and he responds with only seconds to spare. In the final section, the celebrated “Dream-Fugue,” De Quincey tells the reader how the figure of that same terrified young woman, glimpsed for just a few moments, subsequently entered into the “gorgeous mosaics” of his dreams, featuring in a variety of perilous or fatal situations. In the final, apocalyptic, dream-sequence De Quincey’s mail-coach becomes a “triumphal car” proceeding at supernatural pace down a cathedral aisle of infinite length; a female infant who temporarily obstructs its path somehow becomes synonymous with all the victims of war, past and present, while her apparent survival or exaltation stands not only for the material gains of “Waterloo and Recovered Christendom” but also for the spiritual end of resurrection and eternal life.
Even this brief summary should make clear that De Quincey’s mail-coach is more than just a horse-drawn carriage. It is, in fact, a powerful mobile metaphor, freighted with all manner of symbolic meanings that modern literary critics have delighted in picking over. Sometimes these meanings seem startling or contradictory. It is, for instance, remarkable that the mail-coach, which at the beginning of the essay epitomises pre-industrial travel and communications and is an object of sentimental regard, nevertheless somehow comes to represent the unstoppable flight of Britain into an industrialised modernity. The unnerving speed of the mail-coach expresses, for some readers, the velocity of social change or the urgency of historical process. For others, the vehicle embodies the hopes and fears of the nation at a critical stage in the European theatre of war, or reflects the author’s belief in Britain’s pre-eminence as an imperial power. For critics of a certain theoretical persuasion, the mail-coach has even been read as a metaphor for the power and unpredictability of language itself.
The logic and relative strength of these various interpretations can, of course, only be assessed via a careful reading of the whole essay, and in that undertaking every reader’s journey is his or her own. In a similar manner, only by immersing oneself in De Quincey’s beautiful yet often convoluted prose can one properly appreciate the ingenuity with which a meditation on road travel, brought to life initially as an intense physical and sensory experience (“we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling”), turns subtly yet completely into an account of movements of the mind and of humanity’s ultimate spiritual journey.
What is also fascinating for the modern reader of “The English Mail-Coach,” however, is the way in which, despite its almost antiquarian subject-matter, it continues to stimulate thought about aspects of modern society and culture. To take one example, speed is at the heart of De Quincey’s love affair with the mail-coach: he recalls fondly the “continually augmenting velocity of the mail” that sometimes seemed to “trample on humanity.” In fact, mail-coaches travelled, on average, at what must now seem an extremely sedate ten miles an hour, but in psychological terms there seems little to separate De Quincey’s experience from that of the first generation of railway travellers, who (as Wolfgang Schivelbusch pointed out in his classic study, The Railway Journey) celebrated the “annihilation of time and space” on the basis of locomotive speeds of 20-30 miles per hour. Then we think of the transport and communications technologies of our own time — of the serene efficiency with which planes can take us in a matter of hours to places our ancestors could only read or dream about, or of the almost indecent speed with which electronic messages can travel from one side of the world to the other. It seems that every generation is fated to rediscover the extinction of time and space in its own manner. ※※Indexed under…Vehiclesand extinction of time and space
One of the striking features of De Quincey’s retrospective account is the degree to which he relishes being the physical embodiment of good news, so that the typical response of citizens elated by confirmation of military success seems to have been to throw their arms around the mail-coach aficionado. This fits with his preference for the mail-coach over the railway as the central instrument of an organic, rather than mechanical, system. His choice of words in calling the mail-coach a “national organ” for broadcasting momentous news is no accident: he writes elsewhere of an ideal state of communication “between the centre and the extremities of a great people” as resembling “the systole and diastole of the human heart,” and for him it was the mail-coach, rather than the railways, that came closest to realising this biological model. This was because it relied more visibly on human energies and effort, transmitted by some mysterious contagion to the “electric sensibility of the horse,” rather than on the mechanical “interagencies” of “iron tubes and boilers” that had no sympathy with the affairs of men. What the close cooperation of man and beast seemed to guarantee was that there was no dilution of passion as news and opinion travelled around the network; ultimately, what De Quincey desired was that all communication should have the spontaneity and directness of a face-to-face encounter.
Curiously enough, the rapid development of digital technologies and new media has done nothing to disqualify De Quincey’s seemingly impossible dream. Despite the obvious financial benefits for companies and other organisations of cultivating virtual relationships, business travel has not diminished but in fact continues to grow year on year, with time-poor men and women criss-crossing the globe in order to look each other in the eye and seal agreement with a handshake. Neither have the new technologies turned their back on the ethos of personal encounter, as the one billion worldwide users of Facebook, with its instant messaging, voice calling, and video calling facilities can testify. It seems that every step forward in the digital era also takes us back, perversely, to De Quincey’s nostalgic pre-industrial world of human connections, of the constant befriending of total strangers, and the stubborn reliance on spontaneous word and gesture.
De Quincey’s musings on sudden death, prompted by recollections of his near-catastrophic collision with the young couple in a gig, also have a strange contemporary resonance. He begins by contrasting pagan and Christian attitudes to sudden death, which, he suggests, may depend on different meanings of the phrase: an “unlingering death” versus “a death without warning.” Then he focuses on one particular variety of sudden death, that in which the victim has “some hurried and inappreciable chance of evading it,” and must act speedily and decisively in what will, in all likelihood, be a forlorn attempt at survival. Even more desperate, De Quincey says, is a situation in which another life or lives depend on one’s acting with such rapid resolve. Here arises the spectre of moral cowardice, of a man in desperate straits lying down before the lion (in De Quincey’s idiosyncratic phrase): “The effort might have been without hope; but to have risen to the level of that effort—would have rescued him, though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his duties.”
“It is not,” De Quincey remarks, “that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials.” And yet, sometimes they are. On 11 September 2001, some passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 fought to regain control of the hijacked plane, one of four commercial airliners deployed in the coordinated al-Qaeda assault on the United States. Staring death in the face, and having already heard via in-flight calls of the attack on the World Trade Centre, they somehow forced the hijackers to abandon their target (most probably the US Capitol) and crash the plane in an empty field in rural Pennsylvania. All forty passengers and crew were killed, but the passenger revolt almost certainly prevented much greater loss of life on the ground. As with De Quincey’s young man, who has mere seconds to manoeuvre his carriage into a safer position and save the life of his female companion, “sudden had been the call upon [them], and sudden was [their] answer to the call.” The circumstances could hardly be more different, yet much of what De Quincey says about the courage required to face “some fearful crisis on the great deeps of life” seems to apply just as well, if not better, to Flight 93 as to his scary incident on the road to Preston.
As we now know, the story of Flight 93 also demonstrates the frightening power of modern communication technologies — which is, of course, the central theme of De Quincey’s essay. Using Airfones or their own mobile phones, many passengers were able to call their husbands, wives, or other family members, to inform them that they were almost certainly about to die, and to tell them one last time that they loved them. (By contrast, the hysterical young woman in the gig was able only to throw “up her arms wildly to heaven.”) How De Quincey might have contemplated the unspeakable anguish of such a call is difficult to imagine. This is surely one form of instantaneous — if not face to face — communication that he would have balked at.
It is the ability of De Quincey’s essay to trigger such unexpected yet thought-provoking connections that gives it its enduring appeal. Despite its historical subject-matter and its general orientation towards the past, the “English Mail-Coach” is still picking up new meanings and relevancies, is still an intense, sometimes uncomfortable, yet exhilarating ride.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 20, 2013

author: Robin Jarvis


text:
The Redemption of Saint Anthony

By Colin Dickey
March 7, 2013

Gustave Flaubert, best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary, spent nearly thirty years working on a surreal and largely 'unreadable' retelling of the temptation of Saint Anthony. Colin Dickey explores how it was only in the dark and compelling illustrations of Odilon Redon, made years later, that Flaubert's strangest work finally came to life.

In the fall of 1849, Gustave Flaubert invited his two closest friends—Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp—to hear a reading of what he believed was to be his masterpiece: a retelling of the temptation of St. Anthony. The 30 year-old writer had been working on it for four years, and he was excited to finally share it with the two men whose opinion he trusted more than anyone else. Bouilhet and du Camp were likewise excited; they both knew of his extraordinary potential, and were anxious to hear this masterwork that had so fully consumed him. He read the entire five hundred and forty-one pages straight through: eight hours a day in uninterrupted four-hour blocks of time, for four solid days. Bouilhet and du Camp would later remember it as the most painful days in their lives, as they listened to an endless morass of words that was alternately incomprehensible, banal, repetitive and childish. After it was over, they did their best to put a good face on it, and to let him down easy; Bouilhet, with as much tact as he could muster, told Flaubert simply, “We think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.”
Instead of continuing to work on the Temptation, they challenged him instead to write something completely devoid of romanticism and symbolism—something instead minutely detailed, objectively reported, as in the vein of Balzac. And so Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the book that changed not only his life but changed forever contemporary literature—and which, one could say, was the result of something crossed between a dare and a punishment.
And still, Flaubert never gave up on the Temptation. He rewrote it three times over the course of his life, spending close to three decades trying to get it right, finally publishing it in 1874. Even as he was writing Sentimental Education, Salammbô, and Bouvard and Pécuchet, he never forgot it, and yet it cannot begin to compare to those other works. The Temptation was the ghost lingering behind all of Flaubert’s better works; in the words of Michel Foucault, “The Temptation seems to represent Flaubert’s unattainable dream: what he wanted his works to be — supple, silky, delicate, spontaneous, harmoniously revealed through rapturous phrases — but also what they must never be if they were to see the light of day.” It became the thing he returned to time and time again, always the antithesis of his great writing, and it stood in stark opposition to the works by which he is now mostly known. “Suspended over his entire work,” Foucault writes, “it is unlike all his other books by virtue of its prolixity, its wasted abundance, and its overcrowded bestiary; and set back from his other books, it offers, a photographic negative of their writing, the somber and murmuring prose which they were compelled to repress, to silence gradually, in order to achieve their own clarity. The entire work of Flaubert is dedicated to the conflagration of this primary discourse: its precious ashes, its black, unmalleable coal.”
The first English translation was by Lafcadio Hearn, begun in 1875, and it remains perhaps the best translation available. As Marshall C. Olds notes in the recent Modern Library edition, Hearn’s rendering—somewhat archaic, anachronistic, and baroque—best matches the strange, baroque quality of the original. The Temptation is one of those few works that does not benefit from a modern translation; the further it recedes into the past, the more compelling the book feels.
That said, even in this form the work is difficult to read. It remains, stubbornly, as du Camp and Bouilhet largely first heard it: repetitive, without much direction, and strangely empty of feeling despite its wild imaginings and endless litany of strange figures. Written not as a novel, but as an impossible play, the creatures summoned to taunt Anthony are described in bare-bones stage direction, and so even as Anthony himself cowers or stands in awe, we have little of the same feeling towards these strange monstrosities:
Then idols of all nations and of all epochs—of wood, of metal, of granite, of feathers, of skins sewn together—pass before them. . . . The more that the idols commence to resemble the human forms, the more they irritate Anthony. He strikes them with his fists, kicks them, attacks them with fury. They become frightful—with loft plumes, eyes like balls, fingers terminated by claws, the jaws of sharks.
If the speeches rehearsed by these monsters are meant to inspire wonder or horror, they often fail by virtue of their bloodless depiction: “Respect me! I am the contemporary of beginnings,” cries Oannes, a creature whose body is half fish, half man. “I dwelt in that formless world where hermaphroditic creatures slumbered, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the deeps of dark waters—when fingers, fins, and wings were blended, and eyes without heads were floating like mollusks, among human-faced bulls, and dog-footed serpents.”
But perhaps the real draw of the Temptation is not its readability; its strengths lie elsewhere. Oannes is just one of many creatures in Flaubert’s book that may at first glance to seem to be a product of his imagination, but which was not. An ancient Mesopotamian god who supposedly taught early man writing, art and science, Flaubert learned of him through the writings of the third century BCE Babylonian writer Berossus. As it happens, nearly all of the creatures in the Temptation are figures that Flaubert found in archaic chronicles and encyclopedias: the book is less one of imaginative fancy than it is meticulous research and compilation. What’s remarkable about the Temptation is how it records, with minute accuracy, Flaubert’s research; while it may seem the result of a fevered hallucination, something akin to “Kublai Khan” or the paintings of Bosch, it’s instead a record of copious bibliographic study—and it is this which is perhaps most noteworthy about its composition. “The fantastic is no longer a property of the heart,” Foucault writes, “nor is it found among the incongruities of nature; it evolves from the accuracy of the knowledge, and its treasures lie dormant in documents. Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a true image is now a product of learning.” The result of prodigious reading, and yet nearly unreadable itself, it would be almost a decade before the Temptation came alive.
“Here is the nightmare transported into art,” J. K. Huysmans wrote of Odilon Redon’s work in 1881. “Plunged into a macabre milieu, imagine somnambulistic figures, twisted with fear, having a vague kinship with those of Gustave Moreau, and perhaps you will have an idea of the bizarre talent of this singular artist.” Redon (1840-1916) had been working in lithography since around 1870, developing a singular style that anticipated both the decadent symbolism of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth. Redon’s milieu borrowed largely from the gothic folktales of his childhood, to which he borrowed a pictorial vocabulary from an unlikely place: the grotesque cartoons of political satire, with its half-politician half-animal hybrids, its exaggerated facial features and deformities, and the tone of decadent depravity. This Redon adapted to his darker subject matters, creating, in his Origins series and his noirs, which depict a nightmare landscape where spiders have human eyes and flowers have faces. (J. K. Huysmans, meanwhile, would later pay another form of homage to Redon; in his classic À Rebours, his protagonist des Esseintes collects prints by Redon—a move that helped catapult Redon’s work into the mainstream.)
Redon had been working for over a decade when the third and final version of Flaubert’s Temptation was finally published; “It is a literary marvel and a mine for me,” he wrote of the book, in which he saw an endless litany of bizarre figures and distorted creatures that he could adapt as inspiration. Their work formed a natural kinship; as Stephen F. Eisenman comments, “Like Flaubert, Redon saw himself as unique, an accident, a monster, and all the more remarkable an artist for these very reasons.” Redon began producing a series of plates based on the Temptation, work which finally unlocked the strangeness and decadent symbolism that Flaubert had dreamt of but which he could never quite evoke on the page.
In perhaps the most striking and well-known example, Redon took Flaubert’s image of death, rendered by the author in a bare bones description (“It is a death’s head with a crown of roses. It rises above a woman’s torso, pearly white. Beneath this, a shroud with dots of gold acts as a sort of tail—the whole body undulates, as might a gigantic worm lifting upright.”), and renders a figure of terrible beauty. All of Flaubert’s components are there, from the roses above to the “sort of tail” below, but Redon’s composition has turned them into something else entirely: the skull is half-obscured in darkness, turned away in either longing or disgust, while her body emerges out of pure blackness. The sense of both endlessness and motion conveyed by the tail spiraling out below her, and the garland of roses streaming out from her head, goes well beyond Flaubert’s original writing—Stephen Mallarmé would later write to Redon, “I am stupefied by your Death. . . I do not believe any artist has ever made, or poet dreamed, an image so absolute!”
Other images are far stranger, following Flaubert down the rabbit hole of a world where bodies and shapes are free of any seemingly natural order. Redon’s mastery at using light and shadow, particularly in his use of the pure black that lithography offered, properly evoked the sense of mystery and despair that Flaubert had intended but could never quite create. Redon’s bestiary offers a richer manifestation than Flaubert’s blueprint, particularly his sphinx and chimera, or the half-ostrich, half-ape figure that accompanies Flaubert’s line “There must be, somewhere, primordial figures whose bodies are nothing but their images.” And then there is Oannes, rendered by Redon as a pensive face mounted on a body that swirls up from the darkness.
But while these figures may have seemed strange, beyond the ken of nature, Redon was as inspired by the recent work of Darwin and Cuvier as he was of by medieval bestiaries. Increasingly vigorous taxonomists and scientific explorers were reporting back an increasingly bizarre litany of animals far stranger than those dreamed up by the human imagination. “Science recognizes no monsters,” says Jules in Sentimental Education; which is to say, that in science an artist could find ample inspiration for the monstrous. Just as Flaubert’s work represents a mind rigorously compiling monstrosities of the library, Redon’s work reflects a mind gleefully intermixing images from religion and science, allowing monsters whose bodies are nothing but their images. As Eisenman writes, his images for the Temptation read like “anagrams,” inviting “the viewer to create order out of the apparent chaos.”
Redon’s work, which caused a sensation in its day but has too often been neglected (particularly outside France), represents perhaps the true potential, and use, of Flaubert’s Temptation. An alchemy of Flaubert’s research, his excessive documentation of strange beasts and foreign gods, brought to life by a pictorial imagination that could make use of everything from political satire to naturalists’ field reports, is what finally brings Anthony’s struggle to life, and finally makes clear the horror and awe in his eyes as Redon’s bestiary parades before our eyes. Flaubert’s Temptation is less a book to be read then it is an archive that can be endlessly plundered. As Redon’s work amply demonstrates, there is material left there to mine.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Colin Dicke