text:
Illustrating Carnival
Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras
By Allison C. Meier
February 7, 2018

For more than 150 years the city of New Orleans has been known for the theatricality and extravagance of its Mardi Gras celebrations. Allison C. Meier looks at the wonderfully ornate float and costume designs from Carnival’s “Golden Age” and the group of New Orleans artists who created them.

On March 6, 1889, the New York Times breathlessly reported on the recent Carnival spectacles in New Orleans. The Krewe of Rex’s pageant, themed around “Treasures of the Earth”, included a “Crystal” float “attended by figures in gorgeous costumes and prisms by the thousand”, and a “Diamond” float featuring “a rocky diamond dell” through which flowed “limpid streams where nymphs sported and played with the gems”. The Krewe of Proteus, meanwhile, dazzled with their “Hindoo Heavens” pageant, where in one scene appeared Agni “God of Fire” riding a ram that “strides the flames, attended by the fire sprites.” This opulent, and highly exoticized, interpretation of South Asian religion concluded with a tableau where “Vishnu, under the guise of a horse with silver wings, shatters the earth with his hoof and rises to the celestial abode.”
The modern American Mardi Gras owes much of its bombastic revelry to this late nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of Carnival design. From the invitations to the costumes to the hand fans carried by spectators, artists designed entire identities for each Krewe (a group that organizes a Carnival event). Carnival and its culminating day of festivities — Mardi Gras — was brought to the Louisiana area by the French in the late seventeenth century. Mardi Gras as it’s celebrated today is often linked to the Mistick Krewe of Comus, an Anglo-American group which in 1857 organized a debut parade themed “The Demon Actors in Milton’s Paradise Lost”. It was a departure from previous Carnivals that were more informal and tied to the Roman Catholic community. Following the Civil War, new Krewes emerged, each attempting to outdo the others with increasingly elaborate wood and papier-mâché floats pulled by teams of horses. One year it might be Medieval legends coming to life on the streets, the next flying monkeys of Chinese mythology terrorizing the crowds.
“The city developed a Carnival aesthetic that blended popular Carnival tradition with the artistic currents of the late nineteenth century”, writes Reid Mitchell in the 1995 book All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. “The latter contributed largely to Carnival’s Orientalism. Carnival with its costumes, processions, tableaux, and bals masque played to the late nineteenth-century love of fantasy, of exoticism.”
Mythology, literature, religion, and history, as well as nineteenth-century book illustration and turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau, were remixed into an eclectic excess. Up to the early 1900s, the main Krewes were Rex, Comus, Proteus, and Momus, each with their favorite artist collaborators. The names of these individuals are now obscure, but artists Jennie Wilde, Bror Anders Wikstrom, Charles Briton, Carlotta Bonnecaze, and others now anonymous all influenced the embrace of the fantastic that endures into the present. The greatest publicly accessible resource of their art is the Carnival Collection, part of the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) at Tulane University and supported by a bequest from the late journalist Charles L. “Pie” Dufour. In 2012, Tulane marked the completion of a two-year digitization project that put over 5,500 float and costume designs in the Carnival Collection online.
These watercolor-and-ink drawings were intended to be ephemeral — some have visible pin holes from being tacked on the wall by costume makers in Paris — and thus not all were saved. Due to their delicate nature, they’re also rarely on view. Through April 1, the New Orleans Museum of Art is exhibiting selections from the Carnival Collection in Bror Anders Wikstrom: Bringing Fantasy to Carnival. Although his name is carved right on the frieze of the museum’s façade, included in a litany of American art luminaries like Whistler, Audubon, and Copley, it’s likely few visitors are familiar with the Swedish immigrant. Bringing Fantasy to Carnival features a full set of the twenty floats he designed for the Krewe of Proteus’ 1904 “The Alphabet” parade, with “D for Dragon” carrying knights fighting a red, purple, and green beast, and “U for Unicorn” featuring three one-horned white horses riding before a rainbow.
Wikstrom came to New Orleans in 1883. A painter of maritime scenes, inspired by his time as a sailor, he was an active member of the local arts community, helping to found the New Orleans Artists Association that was influential in the opening of the New Orleans Art Museum in 1910. His extremely imaginative illustrations are transporting in their detail, whether the battling tiger-lillies with actual tigers leaping from blossoms and anthropomorphized cacti fending them off, from the 1898 “A Trip to Wonderland”, or the full Egyptian-style temple for the crowning of the pharaoh scene in the 1903 “Cleopatra” parade.
Of course, artists could sketch any dream they wanted, building it was another thing. Comparing the illustrations to historic photographs online at the Louisiana Digital Library, it’s evident there were some concessions to making a float the horses could actually navigate through the crowds. Yet the early parades transformed into otherworldly reveries at night, when flambeaux carriers, a dangerous role traditionally given to black men, illuminated the darkness with fire. Then the warm, quavering light of the flames gave the fabricated demons, dragons, fairies, and gods a convincing glow.
Wikstrom started as an assistant to a fellow Swedish immigrant, Charles Briton. Briton arrived in New Orleans in 1865, and worked for a time with lithographer Emile Boehler, eventually devoting his artistic talents to Carnival. While he designed floats, invitations, and all the other Krewe materials, his costumes are the most ingenious. His 1882 “Ancient Egyptian Theology” illustrations for the Krewe of Proteus morphed participants into a hieroglyphic-adorned Horus and Anubis, and the 1873 “Missing Links” for Comus metamorphosed humans into beetles, coral polyps, ears of corn, grasshoppers, and leeches.
The full title of this 1873 parade was “Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species”, and its satire bristled against the post-Civil War changes in the South. Michael Taylor describes its identifiable characters on the Louisiana State University Special Collections site: “Ulysses S. Grant, for example, has been crossed with a caterpillar and lounges on a leaf smoking a cigar. General Benjamin Butler, the despised commander of the Union army in New Orleans during the Civil War, is shown in another cartoon dining with a party of bears and hyenas.” The parade’s political barbs did not go undetected, and it was ultimately blocked by police from crossing Canal Street. Among the costume drawings that survive in the Carnival Collection is Darwin himself as an ass, and one of a gorilla playing a banjo, a racist caricature that ridiculed the humanity of black people at a time when Reconstruction amendments were constitutionally affirming their rights. Within the Carnival whimsy was the use of its sumptuousness to elevate white Southerners as “kings” and “queens”, with finery and balls that excluded non-white participants.
Significantly, in an era of male-dominated arts, several women were leaders in Carnival designs. Born in Georgia, the prolific Jennie Wilde brought a lavish Art Nouveau elegancy to her illustrations for Comus and Momus. For the 1902 Lord Byron–themed floats for Momus, she envisioned his metaphysical poem “Manfred” with a mermaid, waifish spirits, and the lurking specter of death in the form of a skull; “The Prisoner of Chillon” has a lonely, bearded man chained in a Gothic dungeon, swarmed with bats, with one giant winged mammal acting as the eerie float’s prow.
For Comus’ 1911 “Familiar Quotations” she positioned couples on the “What are the wild waves saying” float gazing at a torrent of water from pearlescent shells; and butterflies, gargantuan poppies, a sea serpent, and botanical forms swept in a current of foliage on “Such stuff as dreams are made of”.
In his 2001 book Mardi Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age Notecards, Henri Schindler writes that Wilde was
fascinated throughout her career with the painting and literature of the symbolists and the decadents, with the chimeras and operatic grandeur of Gustave Moreau and Gustave Flaubert, the sensually tinted worlds of Pierre Loti, and the Babylonian apocalypses of Jean Rochegrosse. Nurtured in this other-worldly splendor, Wilde in turn called forth visions of exotic temples and molten clouds, bowers of gigantic flora, and enchanted beasts.
In 1913, Wilde died at the age of 48 while on a trip to England. Her final designs for “Tales From Chaucer” appeared in 1914, debuting the very night she was interred in New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery. In addition to Wilde, there were several other women who had a major role in Carnival art. Carlotta Bonnecaze created dazzling scenes with an air of science fiction, such as the 1886 parade “Visions of Other Worlds” for Krewe of Proteus, with lightning-wielding extraterrestrials riding on a comet, six-armed beings wandering a Saturn covered with prickly cacti, and a desolate moon where wizened figures seem frozen in gray craters.
Later, Ceneilla Bower Alexander decked out the Krewe of Rex with an Aurora Borealis float in 1912 and ethereal angel costumes in 1920, and in the 1920s and ’30s, Léda Hincks Plauché sketched feathered serpents and Don Quixote scenes for the Krewe of Proteus.
The Great Depression effectively ended this period of no-expense-spared Mardi Gras, yet its spirit of visual exuberance thrives into the twenty-first century. The papier-mâché, wood, paint, and maybe a few fake jewels, used to turn an ordinary person into a trickster devil or graceful half-human, half-butterfly, and a horse-drawn cart into a wonderland, endure in the spirit of Carnival creation. As the annual bacchanalia of parades, processions, and parties continues in New Orleans, there are still threads to follow back to these artists who shaped fantasies into reality.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 7, 2018

author: Allison C. Meier


text:
Early Modern Memes
The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print
By Katie Sisneros
June 6, 2018

Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Katie Sisneros explores this interplay of repetition, context, and meaning, and how in it can be seen a parallel to meme culture of today.

In a dramatic 1609 news pamphlet entitled Newes from Sea, of two notorious Pyrates Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman, one particularly thrilling story about two of the most infamous pirates in Early Modern Europe unfolds from the perspective of the English merchants who witnessed it. John Ward and Simon Danseker were household names in England: the two pirates served as mercenaries on Turkish ships that ransacked trading ships from Christian nations like England, Spain, and France. In this printed account, English traders aboard the ship Charity watched with horror as a Turkish ship, captained by John Ward, overtook a French ship on the high seas. The account states: “our eies were made witnesses that they tooke the Merchant and the Master, and hanged them uppe at their yard armes . . . the pittifulnesse of which spectacle, we being in the view of beholding, would have compelled any but such hated villaines, even with teares for to have lamented.”
Featured prominently on the title page of the pamphlet is that very scene: an English ship nose-to-nose with a Turkish ship (evidenced by the crescent moon flags and turban-wearing men) and two unfortunate human figures hanging gruesomely by their necks from the mast of the ship. The image perfectly encapsulates the harrowing moment.
In all likelihood, the woodblock that produced the imprint featured on the pamphlet was created specifically for that text. But it was far from a one time use illustration. Between 1609 and 1617 the woodblock either changed hands or was lent, from Edward Allde to George Eld, who employed it in 1617 in another news pamphlet that told a similarly harrowing tale of English merchants battling bravely against a horde of Turkish pirate ships. Although A fight at sea, famously fought by the Dolphin of London against fiue of the Turkes men of warre, and a satty the 12. Of Ianuary last 1616 does not mention a grisly double hanging in its text, the reuse of the woodcut was perfectly logical and thematically appropriate. As the century drew on, however, this woodblock would go through some dramatic changes. Its representational function would morph over time as it changed owners and began to be used primarily to illustrate broadside ballads. These two ships would reemerge time and time again on printed ballads, each time in a different context and performing a different representational function.
The reuse of woodcuts in early modern popular print was an industry standard. Quick, timely, and engaging popular literature was in increasingly high demand in seventeenth-century England. Printers and booksellers were competing against each other for readership so they had to be able to produce lots of texts quite quickly and pique a customer’s interest in buying one with an eye-catching image. But the crafting of a woodcut from a woodblock was a major financial investment for a printer, as it required high quality, resilient wood and the artistic labor to carve a detailed image into its surface. Publishers and printers would reuse old images in dozens of different ways rather than go through the costly process of commissioning new illustrations for each text. The obvious practical upshot to reusing the same woodcut over and over has lent some credence to the assumption that printers must have been apathetic about which images they chose — that the significance of a woodcut’s particular image was secondary to its ability to stand in as an eye-catching stock image, irrespective of the text it accompanied. Thankfully, recent scholarship rejects the dismissal of ballad woodcuts as mere decorative extras.1
If there was indeed method and meaning to what might appear to a modern-day viewer to be the almost random assignment of images to only vaguely related text, how did it manifest? In what ways were woodcuts reappropriated for different representational needs, and how were consumers of these texts processing the images that were recurring consistently in their everyday lives? By exploring a few examples (and revisiting our pirate ships later in their publishing life) we can start to understand how contemporary audiences engaged with  individual texts as well as with the pantheon of popular literatures that influenced their lives. We can also see how this practice of reuse parallels aspects of our own modern culture, in particular the phenomenon of the internet meme. The re-used woodcut can be seen to function as a sort of proto-meme, the meanings of an image multiplying through continued reuse in varying contexts. This reuse was pervasive across all manner of popular print genres, from news pamphlets to political propaganda. Among these, the broadside ballad distinguishes itself: eminently cheap and printed in mass quantities, the genre was consumed by a broad swath of English subjects — an ideal case study.
The reuse of woodcuts was pervasive across all manner of popular print genres, from news pamphlets to political propaganda. Among these, the broadside ballad distinguishes itself: eminently cheap and printed in mass quantities, the genre was consumed by a broad swath of English subjects — an ideal case study.
As a starting point for understanding the extent to which printers were reusing images and what that might have meant for a casual consumer of broadsides, let’s more or less choose one at random. Let us stick our first pin in the early 1680s ballad A sweet and Pleasant Sonnet, Entituled, My Mind to me a Kingdom is, which shares a broadsheet with another ballad entitled A proper new Ballad of a Dream of a Sinner, being very fore troubled with the Assaults of Satan. This broadsheet (featured above) features three woodcuts of male figures, each of which in turn can be traced many decades backwards and forwards in time, creating a web of correlation and relation through which each of the three figures’ “meanings” evolves, contracts, or expands depending on which ballad you’re viewing. Let’s call them, from left to right, “the how-de-do man” (so named by the historian Christopher Marsh because of the figure’s hand extended out in a warm greeting), “the sovereign”, and “the walking stick man.”
Marsh offers an in-depth exploration of the widely used “how-de-do man” woodcut and notes that he is present in over one hundred extant broadside ballads (and, given the frailty and ephemerality of the broadsheet, likely used on far more). The journeying man in a cape and hat, arm outstretched, was a standard stock image on ballads. He was such a necessary image, in fact, that over twenty-one different publishers had access to at least one version of the image. You can find slight variations in the image across the ballads, meaning multiple woodcuts existed representing the same how-de-do man.2
Marsh argues that roughly seventy-five percent of the how-de-do man’s appearances are positive, eliciting in an audience feelings of admiration and empathy. In A Sweet and Pleasant Sonnet, he plays an everyman philosopher, musing through the words of Edward Dwyer’s famous poem. Whereas in Truth’s Integrity, he presents to viewers a jovial lover with whom any heartsick Englishman could relate: “From Court to the Cottage, / in Bower and Hall, / From the King to the Begger. / Love conquers all.”
This singular image brought with it a lifetime of meaning, and images played as much a role in creating cross-references between ballads as words did (and, of course, the melodies associated with the ballads as well). How you engaged with a viewing of the how-de-do man depended on your previous experiences with him in other ballads, and printers could draw on that experience by using familiar images in unfamiliar constructions to create new meaning. In Strange News from WESTMORELAND, the how-de-do man’s recognizable visage, heavily associated with the idea of a doting lover, has been reassigned to a new, darker role. The ballad tells the story of a cruel husband who drunkenly strikes his wife and kills her, after which Satan himself punishes the man with death. Rather than approaching his lover for an impending embrace, therefore, the female figure is turned away from the man, who is himself approaching the devil.
This is not to say that E. Andrews, who published Strange News from WESTMORELAND in the 1660s, was unaware of the how-de-do man’s prior usages in ballads, and thus presented to a viewing audience a version of him that would have been seen as unrecognizable, confusing, or incorrect. Rather, those old associations are precisely what makes his dramatic redirection in Strange News from WESTMORELAND all the more poignant: an old protagonist, an everyman hero with whom readers could so easily identify, has turned heel. Our prior encounters with a picture help define future encounters with it, and that very familiarity could sometimes be deftly turned against us. What better way for a cautionary tale about uncivilized behavior to truly drive home its point than by turning the common man into the villain?
The sovereign, the next image over on the broadsheet at the center of our web, illustrates the ways in which a single woodcut could expand or contract in meaning depending on its use. Depicted as a header image for the ballad A Dream of a Sinner, the sovereign might represent King Charles II, invoked in the final lines of the ballad: “Our Noble Royal King, / God grant him long to reign, / To live in joy and Peace, the Gospel to maintain.” Alternatively, he might represent one of the main characters of the tale: Christ, who visits a wayward sinner in his sleep.
In 1685’s David and Bersheba, the sovereign is the biblical King David. The image clearly makes no advances toward accurately depicting the King of Jerusalem, but there is little question as to his identity given the context of the ballad. It is clear that the female image next to him, in this case standing in as Bathsheba, was produced by a woodcut with an already long history: much of her detail is lost here, but viewers might’ve remembered seeing her pleated dress and face on ballads from the decades prior.
Jump ahead just a few years to 1697’s Great Britain’s Triumph; Or, The Nation’s JOY for a General PEACE, between the Potent Princes of Europe, and the sovereign might represent any one of the nations concerned in the September 20, 1697, signing of the Treaty of Ryswick, about which the ballad was printed. The treaty ended the Nine Years War between France and the Grand Alliance between England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces. The seated ruler’s crown and orb don’t suggest any nation in particular: he might be the image of King William of England or Louis XIV of France, both of whom are mentioned in the ballad, or he might simply be the embodiment of sovereignty itself.
All of these varieties might seem strange to a modern audience. How could a single image on a single ballad possibly represent more than one thing or person at the same time? According to Marsh, these minor discrepancies in detail, slippages in textual versus image representation, could have been easily filtered out by viewers who were accustomed to finding meanings with which we in the present day struggle.
Returning a final time to our example broadsheet, we are left with the walking stick man. He too crosses over a number of other ballads and wears a variety of hats, as it were, in each of them. In the ballad A Dream of a Sinner walking stick man is the very sinner about which the title speaks, who is visited by Jesus Christ and Satan one night while in a deep sleep, and who awoke joyfully to the realization that he was saved from Satan by Christ’s sacrifice. It’s an uplifting moral tale meant to speak to all good Christians, who are in turn also all sinners.
Walking stick man makes a similar appearance in a 1670s ballad titled A Discription of Plain-dealing, Time, and Death, Which all Men ought to mind whilst they do live on earth in which he represents the everyman’s good conscience and urges him to live a good life before time and death take him at last: “The chiefest Prince that in the world doth Live, / When I him strike, he up the Ghost must give: / His whole Kingdom can’t him from me retain, / From Dust he came, and shall to Dust again.”
If walking stick man, with this tattered robes, hat, and staff can represent the journey from sin to salvation, or the trials of our conscience, he can also represent one of life’s other great odysseys: love. In The BEGGARS Delight, walking stick man plays a poor beggar who is just as capable of loving his lass “as he that has thousands, thousands, thousands, / He that has thousand pounds a year.” Walking stick man’s appearances in broadside ballads seem to have a common thread: his everyman representation is meant as a salve, a comfort to those whose lot in life disadvantages them here on earth. When a viewer sees walking stick man on a broadsheet, he or she might already be able to ascertain the moral of the ballad: you may be poor, but all men are sinners and none are immune to the consequences of death.
I want to divert one last time, following a new trail, this time from The BEGGARS Delight to briefly track the other image on that broadsheet, one that illustrates another common way in which woodcut images were intended for reuse: the two lovers tenderly embracing, empty speech bubble above their heads.
This woodcut makes a number of other appearances in the 1670s and 1680s featuring an empty speech bubble next to the canoodling couple, cupid poised knowingly in the background. But a few speech bubbles are filled in with salacious lyrics, a detail which would offer specificity to the otherwise generic images. In The Hampshire Miller, short and thick, a naughty miller visited a widow at her home. She quickly locked up the doors, and the ballad minces no words about what happened next: “Up stairs together they did high, / The Miller lov’d her Coney Pye, / To shake her Plum-tree he was not slack / But presently she was on her back.” The speech bubble strikes a similar tone: “Have at thy Plum-tree now by guess,” the Miller whispers, “For Widow I can do no less.”
The particulars are somewhat incorrect: in the image, the couple is lying outside, not inside a house. But broadside ballad printing was primarily a commercial pursuit, and printers would have profited greatly off of reusing a thematically related woodcut rather than concerning themselves with the accuracy of details. Two lovers might as easily be embracing on the ground because one has fallen ill: one image with various possible meanings. In this way, viewers were “reading” woodcut images not just as metaphorical representations specific to the ballad, but as a point of reference that calls upon a lifetime of experience consuming printed texts: a broadside ballad was simultaneously an individual text and part of a compendium, an anthology of cultural knowledge that had its parts drawing upon and from within each other to create meaning.
What, then, of our warring ships? How was the woodcut of the English and Turkish ships with the grisly hanging scene reappropriated as the seventeenth century drew on? Scouring the available literature, this author could find only one other appearance of the two ships together, in 1621. Sometime before then, the woodblock itself had gone through a subtle but substantial change. Newes from Argeir tells the harrowing story of an English mission to Algiers that had been sent to free captive slaves but were intercepted by a fleet of Turkish ships prepared for a fight. The English won the day, frightening away the Turks and “left unto our Englishmen / The golden prize of honour then, / which was the worthy conquest of the day.” Of course, the narrative of a resounding English victory against an enemy fleet wouldn’t have been particularly well served by a woodcut that showed two men being executed from the mast of a Turkish ship. And so, at some point between 1617 and 1621, after the woodblock changed hands from George Eld to George Purslowe, who printed Newes from Argeir, the unfortunate men were unceremoniously etched out of the block. The only evidence that they had once been the dramatic centerpiece of the image is a single arm, still visible over a portion of the ship.
Details from a facsimile of Newes from Argeir, of the proceedings of our Royall Fleete since their departure from England, and what happened betweene them, and the Turkish Callies upon Christmas day last, EBBA 20281.
Shortly after, it seems the ships were broken apart entirely, and the Turkish ship sans hanging men would make frequent appearances in naval ballads from the 1650s through the rest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At times, the ship illustrates the tragic tale of Aeneas and Queen Dido, as in A Proper new Ballad, Intituled, the wandring Prince of Troy (1658–64, EBBA 30394). Or perhaps one of a number of enemy Dutch ships that an English fleet sacked and destroyed, as in The Dutch Damnified (1663–74, EBBA 31734). It might even depict a ship that brought with it a nefarious man who successfully wooed a married woman in a ballad meant to warn housewives against cuckoldry, as in A warning for married Women (1658–64, EBBA 31991).
You didn’t have to be a dedicated collector of broadside ballads like Samuel Pepys to notice recurring images in broadside ballad literature, and it is possible a casual reader might have remembered seeing this Turkish ship a few decades prior in a completely different context. Early modern English viewers were accustomed to reorienting or expanding the catalogue of meanings connected to a woodcut image, drawing them into an even deeper engagement with the text at hand, one that recalls a pantheon of previous texts.
It is a collective cultural phenomenon that is not unique to the early modern period, nor did it die out after the ubiquitousness of woodcut impressions in popular print waned. The business of stock photography has trained the modern consumer to simultaneously accept the presence of an image that they’ve likely seen before in a completely different context, while at the same time “reading” the image as something fresh and specific. Just as a seventeenth-century printer might dig laboriously through his woodcut collection to find the perfect (or as close to perfect as his collection allows) woodblock, so too might a modern-day author or digital publisher have to choose the right search terms on a stock photo website to convey, with precision, “sad woman eating salad” or “small dog in a tophat”.
In recent years meme culture has exploded the potential of stock imagery. The repetition and reuse of images in internet memes, particularly those that deliberately exploit stock photos that are somehow both generic and oddly specific, has striking parallels to woodcut culture in seventeenth-century England. Just ask “distracted boyfriend”, lustfully ogling a passing woman while his indignant girlfriend looks on in disgust. Originally uploaded to the stock photo database iStock under the description “Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl”, this twenty-first-century “how-de-do man” has become common fodder for internet culture.
He reappears again and again, each of the characters in the image relabeled to create a new nexus of interpretation. But this time, printers and booksellers are not the gatekeepers of meaning. Anyone can download the image, add their own text, and share their meme with an audience online. Whereas woodcuts could be shared unencumbered by copyright laws that wouldn’t start appearing until the eighteenth century, stock photo imagery and the memes that use them seem to replicate despite their legal ownership. Although stock photos like the disloyal man’s are not intended to be used for free, the internet has made paywalls easily scalable. Once the image sharing and content aggregating websites get ahold of them, there’s no stopping their potential spread. A quicker, easier, and more anonymous process than a woodcut changing hands from one printer to another, but a not dissimilar one.
Just like early modern woodcut images, distracted boyfriend and countless other stock photo meme characters have created an anthology of cultural knowledge. Their cultural currency feeds an expanding and self-replicating web of meaning. The rich early modern woodcut images thankfully still left to posterity offer numerous threads to follow, webs to weave, and connections to draw. In doing so, we can begin to understand early modern consumption of popular literature and recognize the ways in which we reflect some of the very same habits today.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Katie Sisneros

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
The Dreams of an Inventor in 1420

By Bennett Gilbert
January 24, 2018

Bennett Gilbert peruses the sketchbook of 15th-century engineer Johannes de Fontana, a catalogue of designs for a variety of fantastic and often impossible inventions, including fire-breathing automatons, pulley-powered angels, and the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device.

Sometimes we try to invent something new by exploring within the bounds of what is known to be possible, and sometimes we invent by expanding those limits. For an imaginative engineer in the early fifteenth century — working more than two hundred years before the discoveries of Newton — the process of invention would be often a curious mix of the two. You would know so little about mechanical force that you could conjure up almost anything and believe it to be practical. Of course, attempts to bring the designs to reality would often fail, but they might, on occasion, also succeed.
Suppose for a moment that you were such a person possessing a talent for gadgets in the early fifteenth century, or an engineer hoping to build marvelous machines and clever structures no one else had yet dreamed of — how would you go about showing your talents? And what if you were someone who wanted to own wonderful and mysterious devices, such as a prince — how would you find the person who could make these things? A remarkable testimony to this meeting of engineering skill, technological ignorance, individual initiative, and public demand can be found in the Bavarian State Library, in the sketchbook of an Italian inventor of the early fifteenth century. It is a volume of sixty-eight drawings advertising the inventions that Johannes (or Giovanni) de Fontana (ca. 1395–1455), who was both the engineer and the artist, hoped to sell to patrons. Thought to have been created sometime between 1415 and 1420, the work has no title by Fontana that has survived, but a later owner gave it the title Bellicorum instrumentorum liber  — the Book of Warfare Devices — despite the fact that most of it does not concern military matters.
Fontana imagined a wide array of projects: mechanical camels for entertaining children, mysterious locks to guard treasure, flame-throwing contraptions to terrorize the defenders of besieged cities, huge fountains, musical instruments, actors’ masks, and many other wonders. One of the most remarkable features of his ideas is that many of them are impossible to execute: they simply do not conform to the principles of mechanics. This gives them great charm and makes them more interesting, perhaps, than his more rational or practical proposals. We see similar impractical designs in the very few other engineers’ books extant from this early period, most notably in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
Fontana lived at the time of transition from medieval knowledge of the world to that of the Renaissance, which many now regard as the origin of early modern science. In the same years in which Fontana was working, drawing, and dreaming, other builders and engineers were inventing perspective. Goldsmiths along the Rhine and craftsmen in southwestern Germany and elsewhere were thinking about how to copy letterforms mechanically. Engravers in wood and metal were trying dozens of techniques, some lost to us today, for reproducing images. Engineers and tinkerers were learning how to build grander, lighter buildings and were experimenting with ways to defy gravity, to harness natural materials and forces, and to dominate nature. And they were learning new ways to envision their ideas on paper.
The towers and rockets, water and fire, nozzles and pipes, pulleys and ropes, gears and grapples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occupation at the dawn of the Renaissance fill Fontana’s sketchbook. His way of illustrating his ideas, however, is distinctly medieval, lacking perspective and using a limited array of angles for displaying machine works. He drew according to the methods practiced in the previous century, not those of the Italy of Alberti and Brunelleschi in which he lived. He used  liberal splashes of ochre to animate his mechanical monsters and devils with the effects of fire.
Fire had a less terrifying function in some of Fontana’s other designs, being used instead for its light-giving properties. In fact, Fontana made the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device, which transformed the light of fire into emotive display. It is likely that he actually built such a thing, as his idea for it is specific and practicable. Perhaps one day some relic of it will turn up.
While many of the fire and light devices in Fontana’s designs were for the battlefield, others  were envisaged as elaborate displays  for use in spectacles such as religious plays. Performed in front of churches and cathedrals, the shows would draw large crowds seated on bleachers, built to look like battlements, all around the stage. Medieval playgoers loved to see hell-mouths, angels flying down on wires, and heavenly clouds lifted and lowered by ropes.
Perhaps Fontana’s most elaborate design was an awe-inspiring fire-illuminated spectacle, most likely serving as a propaganda machine, for use in war and in peace.
This fascinating idea draws on many of the arts of spectacle practiced in the late Middle Ages. Drawings on thin-beaten vellum turn in endless loops on spindles. A light source shining through the translucent medium projects shadows onto temporary walls overshadowed by a tower bearing mighty emblems. The visitor is led through a series of doors into the labyrinth of a fantastic world. The structure was most likely meant to stand as an enormous edifice that represented the personal abode of a prince or lord.
In addition to his fiery constructions, Fontana also designed many fountains and other hydraulic devices. Before modern water infrastructure, water sources were more visible in people’s lives than they are now. The importance of water and the fragility of its supply were not hidden by massive administrative schemes. Water was life, and it was danger, too.
Here’s Fontana’s idea for lifting sunken ships — an urgent and vexing problem of the day.
Fontana also tried to harness wind power as well as water power for musical instruments.
This one would have been as interesting to the eye as it would have been to the ear.
In one of the most curious drawings in the book, Fontana imagined a life support system for patients undergoing gruesome surgeries.
He also turned his imagination to more frivolous subjects and designed moving toys to entertain children.
In general he was interested in developing flexible structures for entertainment and for civil engineering. He was particularly fascinated by locks and interlocking structures.
But there are quite a few drawings that are utterly puzzling.
They use some of the forces and themes mentioned above — hydraulics, fire, and flexible or interlocking parts. But because cross section and other visual techniques such as perspective were not used by (and likely not known to) Fontana and perhaps also because his imagination exceeded his skills, what he meant to make and how he thought it was to be done remain something of a mystery. His captions, written in code, do not help much because they describe the function he intended them to perform rather than explain how they were actually constructed or operated.
This is just a sampling of the bounty of drawings found in Johannes de Fontana’s manuscript. Many of the others illustrate fierce siege engines and trebuchets, as well as handsome fountains and playful ornaments. Leafing through the pages we get a glimpse of what it was like to be an imaginative inventor right on the cusp of the Renaissance. He was resourceful and aspirational in ways people of every era would recognize and that we can see in ourselves. We may have more science than he had, but, like Fontana, we still show off our inventions to the wealthy and the powerful, currying their favor and seeking their financial support. War is as much a part of modern life as it was in Fontana’s day, with its  ceaseless need for new inventions for murder and destruction. As unfamiliar as Fontana’s drawn line might be, he used his pen and brush for purposes very similar to ours when we draw and paint, write and speak, or imagine and hope: to find, somehow, the opportunity to build what we dream of creating.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 24, 2018

author: ennett Gilbert


text:
Grandville, Visions, and Dreams

By Patricia Mainardi
September 26, 2018

With its dreamlike inversions and kaleidoscopic cast of anthropomorphic objects, animals, and plants, the world of French artist J. J. Grandville is at once both delightful and disquieting. Patricia Mainardi explores the unique work of this 19th-century illustrator now recognised as a major precursor and inspiration to the Surrealist movement.

The poet Charles Baudelaire greatly admired the graphic arts, writing several essays about the major caricaturists and illustrators of his day. He found something positive to say about each of them with one exception, the artist Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard, known simply as Grandville (1803–1847). And yet, despite Baudelaire’s antipathy, Grandville is arguably the most imaginative graphic artist of the nineteenth century, as well as the most influential on subsequent generations. Baudelaire was well aware of Grandville’s gifts, but his aversion was that of a true classicist:
There are superficial people whom Grandville amuses, but as for me, he frightens me. When I enter into Grandville’s work, I feel a certain discomfort, like in an apartment where disorder is systematically organized, where bizarre cornices rest on the floor, where paintings seem distorted by an optic lens, where objects are deformed by being shoved together at odd angles, where furniture has its feet in the air, and where drawers push in instead of pulling out.1
Baudelaire’s comments were perceptive: these are the very characteristics that, while making him uncomfortable, appealed to the next century’s surrealist artists and writers who saw in Grandville a kindred spirit who shared their interest in the uncanny, in the dream state, and in the world of imagination.
Grandville died young, at forty-three, but in his short life his work ranged across the entire spectrum of graphic art, from political caricature to book illustration. His early drawing Let’s Put Out the Light and Rekindle the Fire! for the journal La Silhouette displays the eerie quality many found so disturbing: the censors are drawn with bellows for heads and one large eye, looking very like birds of prey as they go about their grim business of book-burning under cover of darkness. Behind them other censors resembling candle-snuffers in clerical garb join in, all working to extinguish the lumière, the Enlightenment.
The image proved so biting that it was proscribed, although by then it had already been published. In 1835, however, political caricature ground to a halt when the government instituted a new series of draconian censorship laws calling for prior (not post) publication censorship. Grandville then devoted himself to book illustration and to the world of imagination. Nonetheless, an enigmatic work such as An Animal in the Moon drawn for the 1838 edition of the Fables of La Fontaine is no less strange than his earlier political drawings — perhaps even more so since it lacks clear referents. Why is the disembodied hand holding a rat upside down by the tail? What is the meaning of the discarded scientific instruments, one of which has a human head? Nothing here is rational; it is, as Baudelaire said, disorder systematically organized. Grandville would, no doubt, agree; he described his creative process as such: “I don’t invent, — I just juxtapose dissimilar things and interweave discordant and incongruous forms.”2
During Grandville’s lifetime his best-known works were those in which animals played human roles, delighting audiences both superficial (pace Baudelaire) and sophisticated, who relished the analogies between his personae and the animal avatars assigned to them. Do we really need a lengthy exegesis of the consummate bourgeois holding the rent bill in The Private and Public Lives of Animals?
Mister Vulture indeed! Grandville’s least controversial work has always been his most popular; his posthumously published Flowers Personified, a series of lovely female figures metamorphosed into blooms, for example, has remained in print well into its second century. Like Mister Vulture it needs no interpretation.
There is a reason for this. The work of a graphic artist was always collaborative, undertaken at the behest of a publisher. Graphic artists worked mostly on commission; paid by the piece, they considered themselves fortunate if contracted to produce all the drawings for one of the richly illustrated editions that were so popular with nineteenth-century audiences. The standard procedure was that the artist provided the drawing, which would then be translated into an incised wood engraving, printed and hand-colored by specialists. Grandville did his share of these commissioned works, producing illustrations for Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, and Robinson Crusoe, among others, but because of this expensive and time-consuming production process, graphic artists were rarely allowed to follow their own inclinations.  Nonetheless, Grandville’s most inventive work did just that, departing from the conventional understanding of illustration as subservient to text; Grandville’s drawings stand alone.
When the contemporaneous critic Charles-François Farcy tried to explain the different types of graphic design, he set forth a hierarchy of qualities.3 The lowest level — and always the most popular — was amusement directed at someone’s physical appearance; slightly more elevated was the pleasure offered by the visualization of a depicted situation. But the highest of all was work that broached philosophical or moral questions. Grandville, he judged, fell into this highest category, the philosophical. This quality might explain the disjunction between Grandville’s works that were most popular with his contemporaries and his work that appealed to future generations of artists. He forged a lifetime friendship with Edouard Charton, the editor of Le magasin pittoresque, the first French illustrated periodical, who allowed him to draw whatever he wished. In 1840, Grandville produced a series of musical scores for Le magasin where the notes were personified: Waltz, Military Music, Religious Music, etc., and each was “staffed” by appropriately costumed and performing figures. In Waltz, an interracial couple dances through several lines of music before collapsing, exhausted, in the last bar.
His 1844 Man Descending towards the Brute was a send-up of the contemporaneous interest in evolution — Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle had been published five years earlier. Here age most definitely does not beget wisdom: a young boy “devolves” from the classical physiognomy of youth into a low-browed, slack-jawed ape. In Portraits Compared a prince turns into a frog, the opposite trajectory of fairy-tales. In both projects, Grandville interrogates conventional thinking in drawings that have no need of explanatory text.
In his last letter to Charton, written only weeks before his death, Grandville mused about the drawings he was sending along for publication: “. . . what should be our title? The Metamorphoses of Sleep? Transformations, Deformations, Reformations of Dreams? Sequence of Ideas in Dreams, Nightmares, Reveries, Raptures, etc? or rather Harmonic Transformations of Sleep? But here I think is the true title: Nocturnal Visions and Transformations.”4 And that is what he depicts in A Promenade through the Sky, the languid progression of imagery that passes through our consciousness as it recedes slowly from our quotidian reality into the private world of imagination and fantasy. A mushroom becomes a parasol, which becomes an owl, and gradually the progression of images diminishes into a chariot pulling the horses of night into the stars. . . which taper off in brilliance as consciousness dims into sleep. He returned to this theme often as a kind of visual stream of consciousness where one image dissolves into another. In The Metamorphosis of Sleep, a bird becomes cupid’s arrows, eventually a flower in a vase, then a lovely woman, who gradually fades into a garland of flowers that dissolves into a snake slithering away. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams wasn’t published until 1899, but surely the good doctor would have had much to say about these images.
Of all Grandville’s projects, the one most influential in its afterlife was least successful during his own lifetime, his 1844 Another World. Grandville wanted to produce it himself in its entirety, but he did not write easily. “The pen rebels in my hands at forming sentences”, he explained.5 Although he did produce brief illustrated texts for Le Magasin pittoresque, a full-length novel seemed well beyond his abilities, and so Another World was written by Taxile Delord, the editor of the journal Le Charivari to which Grandville had contributed numerous drawings. In Another World’s introductory dialogue between the personifications of the Pen (the Writer) and the Crayon (the Artist), the Crayon demands “You will allow my wings to move freely through space; you will not impede in any way my flight towards the new spheres that I wish to explore.”6 The Pen responds humbly: “So you want me to serve purely and simply as a secretary?” — to which the Crayon answers, “Precisely”.7 The contract for Another World specified that the novel would be written according to Grandville’s notes, and Delord’s position as a mere scribe is indicated by his name appearing only on the book’s last page, while Grandville’s is prominently displayed on its cover.
The loosely organized plot offers a series of barely related adventures of its three protagonists, Dr Puff, a down on his luck con man who conceives the idea of founding the new religion of Neo-Paganism along with two cronies: Krackq, a seaman whose business card identifies him as “Professor of Swimming”, and Hahblle, a former choirmaster and unsuccessful composer whose desire to revolutionize the musical scale by recognizing the philosophical importance of the note of sol (G) was no more successful than his major symphonic work, The I and the Non-I. Together they decide to explore the universe in order to sell their stories to a publisher. These anti-heroes discover Another World; in fact, they discover several other worlds, each a thinly-veiled satire on our own. The full title of the work bears witness to its extreme departure from contemporaneous literary norms: Another World: Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Vacations, Caprices, Cosmogonies, Reveries, Whimsies, Phantasmagorias, Apotheoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metamorphoses, Metempsychoses, and Other Things. The book’s thirty-four chapters amply deliver on this extravagant promise.
The novel’s minimal narrative functions principally as a framework for Grandville’s drawings — thirty-six full-page hand-colored wood engravings and one hundred forty-six wood-engraved vignettes, smaller images inserted into a page of text. This feature distinguishes Another World from earlier visionary and satirical works such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, making Another World more like a graphic novel than an illustrated text. Each chapter can best be described as posing the question “what if. . .?” What if social status was clearly indicated by stature? In the chapter “The Great and the Small” Puff discovers a world where the idle rich are very tall, while the laboring classes are short. What if, instead of the European gaze objectifying “the other,” the tables were turned? In this reversal, Chinese Shadows (the French term for Shadow Play) becomes French Shadows, and the power dynamics of the gaze are reversed, with the Chinese audience enjoying the spectacle of French performers.
Role reversals were a standard aspect of traditional world-upside-down imagery dating back centuries, featuring pictures of yoked men pulling carts, schoolboys beating their teacher, men caring for babies, etc. Such images served to reinforce the status quo by demonstrating the sheer absurdity of alternatives, but Grandville’s images do the opposite. They depict alternatives that, instead, demonstrate the absurdity of the status quo and serve to undermine it.
While it would be a stretch to consider Grandville a feminist, several of his drawings for Another World explore permutations of gender. In Apocalypse at the Ballet a female dancer becomes disembodied legs, a mechanical spinning top, while the audience is represented by clapping hands that expand, become large and grasping, and then metamorphose into crab claws, then clappers, wine bottles, wine glasses, an hourglass. The shaving brush directly above the clapping hands indicates that the entire progression is a male fantasy. From above, a shower of coins, wreaths, and cupid’s arrows rains down, perhaps the fantasies of the ballerina?
The theme of gender is treated more forcefully in It’s Venus in person! which captures incisively the predicament of an unaccompanied woman subject to the male gaze, represented here as large eyeballs on male torsos. This is the same phenomenon of active seeing and passive objectification that is the subject of French Shadows, for who better than an artist to comprehend the power of the gaze?
But gender roles don’t affect only women. What if both men and women were free to follow their inclinations? Puff visits a country where this is a reality and sees a man dressed in brightly colored stockings and fur muff, while women carry walking sticks and smoke pipes and cigars. Confused, as transvestism was outlawed in France, he consults a conservative newspaper that violently, although apparently ineffectively, fulminates against this practice by asserting that “They are trying to overturn the stability of dress and proclaim the promiscuity of clothing”, concluding “The sexes will never lose the distinctive appearance that differentiates them.”8 But in Another World, they already have.
Grandville’s sympathy is not limited only to humans and animals, however; if sentient beings have rights, why not vegetables too? In the chapter “A Revolution in the World of Plants”, they rise up in revolt: “You, vegetables, hard-working and fertile race, will you allow them to rip away your offspring at the most tender age so they can devour them as early produce? . . . . Hear the cries of victims who demand vengeance from the bottom of the frying pan.”9 Combat of Two Refined Creatures shows the resultant civil war, here featuring the sugar beet in combat with the sugar cane.
Sadly, small degrees of distinction affect even the vegetable kingdom. Even lowly playing cards have the same character flaws, prone to settling their disputes with violence. Battle of the Playing Cards inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and probably ranks as Grandville’s most familiar image to twenty-first-century audiences.
Grandville not only undermines our preconceptions and expands our perceptions of our own world, but he also underscores the limitations of our banal human consciousness in the face of the miraculous. By representing the phenomenon of an eclipse as the embrace of the sun and the moon he proposes Another World of consciousness. The prosaic and rational audience is represented here by mechanical scientific instruments that are completely oblivious to the poetry of the event they are witnessing, seeking only to measure and quantify it. But what if we could comprehend our place in the universe as merely one world among many? We know other planets exist, so why can’t we build bridges to connect them?.
In one of his best-known drawings, he demonstrates our planetary insignificance, at the mercy of a celestial juggler who amuses himself by playing with unknown worlds. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods”, Shakespeare’s King Lear lamented several centuries earlier. In The Juggler, Grandville creates a haunting image of this fate. ※※Indexed under…JugglingCelestial
The philosopher Walter Benjamin was fascinated by Grandville’s art, although he asserted, incorrectly, that Grandville had died insane. In his essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, he identified Grandville with the phantasmagoria of the modern world, especially its burgeoning commodity culture.10 Grandville certainly was aware of this phantasmagoria, showing fashionable mannequins literally composed of their apparel  — fine boots, cane and top hat for men, parasol and chapeau for women. “Why do we even need the rest of the person?” Puff the huckster asks.11
Some of Grandville’s most insightful work in Another World treats this theme: Competition shows men attempting to climb the ladder of success, brandishing self-promotional flyers while lashing out at those who might overtake them. He represents Fashion as a goddess seated at an eternal spinning wheel of styles, but Grandville isn’t referring here to clothing styles alone. Puff the cynic prophesies that eventually all things will be subsumed to fashion: “Once we define glory as worldly success, then naturally we must assign art to the realm of fashion.”12 In the context of Grandville’s ruthless attacks on commodity culture, Benjamin’s critique of him as its epigone seems to miss his point. ※※Indexed under…Fashionas fortune
Grandville was well aware that Another World did not achieve the success he had hoped for. In his last letter to Charton, three years after its publication, he wrote: “Until now, I believe, no work of art has understood and expressed dreams (except Another World, a recent and little-known work by your humble servant).”13 He was correct on both counts: it was unique and it was ignored. When Théophile Gautier wrote his obituary that same year, he lavished praise on The Public and Private Lives of Animals as Grandville’s “true masterpiece” but didn’t even mention Another World.14 It was published in only one edition, never translated into other languages, and never reappeared in his own century. No matter. In 1963 a facsimile edition was published, and the noted surrealist Max Ernst provided a frontispiece for it with the legend, “A new world is born. All praise to Grandville.”15
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 26, 2018

author: Patricia Mainardi


text:
Mesmerising Science
The Franklin Commission and the Modern Clinical Trial
By Urte Laukaityte
November 20, 2018

Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances — Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of “animal magnetism” in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomised placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today.

Patients, mostly women, are sitting around a large wooden tub filled with magnetic water, powdered glass, and iron filings. From its lid emerge a number of bent iron rods against which the patients expectantly press their afflicted areas. A rope attached to the tub is loosely coiled about them, and they are holding hands to create a “circuit”. Through the low-lit room — adorned with mirrors to reflect invisible forces — there wafts incense and strange music, the other-worldly sounds of the glass harmonica (invented by a certain Benjamin Franklin). Meanwhile, a charming man in an elaborate lilac silk coat is circulating, touching various parts of the patients’ bodies where the magnetic fluid may be hindered or somehow stuck. It appears that these blockages, in the ladies in particular, are generally in the lower abdomen, thighs, and sometimes “the ovaria”. The typical session would last for hours and culminate in a curative “crisis” of nervous hiccups, hysterical sobs, cries, coughs, spitting, fainting, and convulsing, thus restoring the normal harmonious flow of the fluid.
The man in the lilac coat is Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer and this scene could be describing any number of animal magnetism sessions he held in late eighteenth-century Paris. While Mesmer’s antics are perhaps familiar to many today, lesser known is the key role they played in the development of the modern clinical trial — particularly in connection with the 1784 Franklin commission, “charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practised at Paris”.
Animal magnetism was all the rage in eighteenth-century Europe, and its star Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a captivating German physician, had celebrity status. His theory claimed that a special kind of imperceptible magnetic fluid pervaded the universe and that most if not all diseases were caused by an abnormal flow of this fluid inside the body. At first, Mesmer’s therapeutic technique consisted of waiving magnets around his patients after making them swallow iron filings. He later would forego the swallowing metal stage and also the magnets: he discovered that simply using his hands or other objects was just as effective. After such so-called “passes” the patient would go into a kind of trance state, then faint, convulse, shake, and so on (what would be aptly named a “crisis”). Ideally, after all this evidently flow-inducing activity, they would be healed.
Mesmer, a charismatic and cultivated man, was married to a rich older widow, and his wife’s moral and material support did not hurt when it came to building a successful medical practice in Vienna. Here he gained notoriety treating mostly upper-class women in his elaborate and rather erotically charged therapeutic sessions. One of his patients was the young pianist Maria Theresa von Paradis, known as “The Blind Enchantress”. Though Mesmer at first seemed to cure her apparent blindness, her recovery was temporary, and the young lady was so emotionally affected by the treatment that for a while she lost her ability to play her instrument. To make matters worse, her protectress (and likely godmother) was also not exactly pleased about the fact that the teenager moved in with Mesmer. Unfortunately for the doctor, she happened to be the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa.
By 1778, having fallen into considerable royal disfavour, Mesmer moved to Paris in a shroud of fame and controversy. Despite the opposition of the medical profession, who denied him a medical license, he partnered up with the respectable and licensed Charles Deslon, personal physician to the brother of King Louis XVI. Mesmer again ended up establishing a stupendously popular clinical practice, winning the favour of many highly influential people. In fact, it only took a few years for animal magnetism to grow into something close to an obsession among the French.
Soon Mesmer and a few disciples started offering magnetic group séances. By the mid-1780s mesmerism had become such a craze that concerned Parisian physicians persuaded the king to establish a royal commission to investigate its claims. The degree to which said craze was lucrative and the rate at which regular medical clinics were losing traffic may, of course, have played a role here. Admittedly, we can sympathise with the patients who deemed that magnetic séances compared favourably with the more mainstream practices of bloodletting and leeching. Either way, it is plausible that the total set of motivations very much included concern for scientific truth.
By a lucky coincidence, Benjamin Franklin was in France as the first US ambassador with a mission to ensure an official alliance against its arch nemesis, the British. On account of his fame as a great man of science in general and his experiments on one such invisible force — electricity — in particular, Franklin was appointed as head of the royal commission. The investigating team also included the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. It is a curious fact of history that both Lavoisier and Bailly were later executed by the guillotine — the device attributed to their fellow commissioner. The revolution also, of course, brought the same fate to King Louis XVI and his Mesmer-supporting wife Marie Antoinette.
In a stroke of insight, the commissioners figured that the cures might be affected by one of two possible mechanisms: psychological suggestion (what they refer to as “imagination”) or some actual physical magnetic action. Mesmer and his followers claimed it was the magnetic fluid, so that served as the experimental condition if you like. Continuing with the modern analogies, suggestion would then represent a rudimentary placebo control condition. So to test animal magnetism, they came up with two kinds of trials to try and separate the two possibilities: either the research subject is being magnetised but does not know it (magnetism without imagination) or the subject is not being magnetised but thinks that they are (imagination without magnetism). The fact that the trials were blind, or in other words, the patients did not know when the magnetic operation was being performed, marks the commission’s most innovative contribution to science.
The report also shows an acute awareness that illness is very likely to go away by itself over time. In fact, in the era of leeching, bloodletting, induced vomiting, laxatives, and so on, it was common for patients to improve without treatment. So for the purposes of rigour, the commissioners rejected the requests from mesmerists to make the study longitudinal and see if their patients get better over an extended period of time. This led Mesmer to refuse to cooperate with the commission. They instead turned to his prime disciple and staunch supporter Charles Deslon (whom an irked Mesmer would subsequently denounce).
A few of the most striking experiments should give you a flavour of the methodology used. The inspiration for the most famous trial likely came from the following incident involving Mesmer, here described in the commission’s report.
One evening M. Mesmer walked with six persons in the gardens of the prince de Soubise. He performed the magnetical operation upon a tree, and a little time after three ladies of the company fainted away. The duchess of C—, the only remaining lady, supported herself upon the tree, without being able to quit it. The count de Mons—, unable to stand, was obliged to throw himself upon a bench. The effects upon M. Ang—, a gentleman of a very muscular frame, were more terrible. M. Mesmer’s servant, who was summoned to remove the bodies, and who was inured to these scenes, found himself unable to move. The whole company were obliged to remain in this situation for a considerable time.
Due to Franklin’s old age, it was a particular apricot tree in his orchard at Passy that was selected for the purpose. Deslon magnetised the tree while a twelve-year-old boy of his choosing stayed in the house. The boy was then made to hug several trees for two minutes each, none of which were magnetised; he collapsed in a full-fledged crisis at the fourth.
Similarly, the commissioners persuaded one of Deslon’s patients, dame P—, who was blindfolded, that Deslon was performing animal magnetism on her, whereas in fact, he was not even around. In a different room, mademoiselle B— was told that Deslon was behind a door. Both women fell into a crisis within the space of three minutes. On the reaction of mademoiselle B— the report said the following:
Her respiration was quick, she stretched out both her arms behind her back, twisting them extremely, and bending her body forward; her whole body trembled; the chattering of her teeth became so loud that it might be heard in the open air; she bit her hand, and that with so much force, that the marks of the teeth remained perfectly visible.
On another occasion dame P— was given several cups of water to drink which she believed to be magnetised. She had a crisis at the fourth cup and, ingeniously, was given some actually magnetised water to help her recover her senses. This she drank gratefully and felt much better afterwards. Finally, mademoiselle B— was magnetised for a full half hour from behind a paper partition while happily chatting away with one of the commissioners. However, when the magnetiser emerged from behind the partition and repeated the same moves in full view, mademoiselle collapsed in a convulsive crisis within minutes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commissioners concluded that imagination alone could produce the same striking effects as mesmerism. Furthermore, animal magnetism by itself was completely toothless and impotent. It is admirable that Deslon himself seems to have acknowledged the power of the commissioners’ approach and accepted the main findings to do with the existence of this “magnetic fluid”. However, even if it proved to be nothing more than imagination, he insisted on its clinical utility. We will never know in what ways Deslon would have developed the practice, as he died just two years later, apparently during a magnetic séance.
In 1784 the reports were drawn: one public and one secret, only for the eyes of the king on account of its indecent elements. Here we encounter another possible reason for the infamous convulsions, which also made the treatment “dangerous to morality”. It is noted that the magnetiser is, as a rule, a man, and his patients are mostly women. Moreover, the setup is such that “the two faces almost touch, the breath is intermingled, all physical impressions are felt in common, and the reciprocal attraction of the sexes must consequently be excited in all its force.” He often positions himself such that the knees are touching, his hands are wandering closer to the lower parts of the body and “these the most sensitive”.
The discerning men of science observed that “[w]hen this kind of crisis is approaching, the countenance becomes gradually inflamed, the eye brightens, and this is the sign of natural desire”, which of course “may be wholly unperceived by the woman who experiences it, but it cannot escape the observant eye of the physician”. This situation is all the more worrying since such treatment could become addictive: “she continues in it, she returns to it, and discovers her peril when it is too late”. It is pointed out that strong women would inevitably flee from such corrupting influences, but “the morals and health of the weak may be impaired”. On these grounds, the report recommended that the king curb the practice of animal magnetism as soon as possible. Presumably, this was in case exposing the false premises of mesmerism alone was not sufficient to stop it being practised.
Whatever the moral case may be, the report paved the way for the modern empirical approach in more ways than one. Stephen Jay Gould called the work “a masterpiece of the genre, an enduring testimony to the power and beauty of reason” that “should be rescued from its current obscurity, translated into all languages”. Just to mention a few further insights, the commissioners were patently aware of psychological phenomena like the experimenter effect, concerned as they were that some patients might report certain sensations because they thought that is what the eminent men of science wanted to hear. That seems to be what propelled them to make the study placebo-controlled and single-blind. Other phenomena reminiscent of the modern-day notion of priming, and the role of expectations more generally, are pointed out throughout the document. The report also contains a detailed account of how self-directed attention can generate what are known today as psychosomatic symptoms. Relatedly, there is an incredibly lucid discussion of mass psychogenic illness, and mass hysteria more generally, including in cases of war and political upheaval. Just five years later, France would descend into the chaos of a violent revolution.
Although the details of animal magnetism may sound absurd (and even morally dubious) to modern ears, within its context Mesmerism was very much in line with the latest scientific developments. In some ways, exciting experiments with invisible forces — gravity, electricity, magnetism, wondrous gases like hydrogen — defined the era. Unlike the occultists of the previous ages, Mesmer was striving to give his practices a rational scientific as opposed to a religious flavour. Indeed, although the magnetic fluid part did not work out, in an important sense, animal magnetism marked the beginnings of hypnosis and psychological suggestion. These are very real and possibly still clinically useful phenomena, as a recent resurgence in research shows. ※※Indexed under…HypnosisAnimal magnetism and
However we judge Mesmer, the ideas and practice of animal magnetism served to precipitate some important developments in how we think about scientific studies today. This episode left a legacy both of humility regarding our collective ability to reason soundly and of new methods for improving that ability. In the words of our learned commissioners:
Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 20, 2018

author: Urte Laukaityte


text:
Fallen Angels
Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Europe
By Natalie Lawrence
April 4, 2018

When birds of paradise first arrived to Europe, as dried specimens with legs and wings removed, they were seen in almost mythical terms — as angelic beings forever airborne, nourished by dew and the “nectar” of sunlight. Natalie Lawrence looks at how European naturalists of the 16th and 17th centuries attempted to make sense of these entirely novel and exotic creatures from the East.

In 1522, the dismembered skins of new and fabulous creatures were brought to the court of Emperor Charles V of Spain. These were birds of paradise from the East Indies, carried with a cargo of spices and other valuable marvels on the last remaining ship from a fleet that had left in 1519 to circumnavigate the globe under Ferdinand Magellan. These birds were unknown and entirely unseen in Europe, but they caused an instant stir. The ship’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, described how five of these enigmatic objects were presented to the Spanish sailors by a Moluccan Sultan as a royal gift for the Emperor:
These birds are as large as thrushes; they have small heads, long beaks, legs slender like a writing pen, and a span in length; they have no wings, but instead of them long feathers of different colours, like plumes . . . they never fly, except when the wind blows. They told us that these birds come from the terrestrial Paradise, and they call them ‘bolon dinata’, that is, “divine birds”.1
These unusual skins were shrunken and wingless, causing their beaks and gorgeous plumes to be disproportionately exaggerated. They were prepared by New Guinean hunters for tribal dances and displays, which still occur in tribal areas of New Guinea. The flesh and limbs were removed, though methods varied by tribe and species of bird, and the whole skin was smoked to heighten the dramatic effect of the elaborate feathers.
Yet the living birds were virtually unknown to anyone outside New Guinea, even to the Moluccan traders who dealt in New Guinean products. One Portuguese apothecary who travelled around Southeast Asia wrote in 1513 that birds “which are prized more than any others come from the islands called Aru (Daru), birds which they bring over dead, called birds of paradise (pasaros de Deus)”. Bird of paradise plumes, in particular, were some of the most coveted products in Asia and had been part of Asian trade networks, which circulated spices and other valuable goods such as ivory and textiles, for at least 5000 years before Europeans reached the region in the late fifteenth century.
Spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg grew only in the Moluccas, but reached the Middle East and eventually Europe in the Middle Ages through trade networks that passed through Venice. Before the sixteenth century, however, nothing was known of the birds of paradise in Europe. It was this high demand for spices in early modern Europe that drove the first European explorations of “a strange, and for so many ages, an unknown world, in order to search for the islands where spices grow”, and, more importantly, to profitably undercut the Venetian monopoly.
Spanish court secretary Maximilianus Transylvanus wrote an account of Magellan’s travels, De Moluccis Insulis (1523), constructed from interviews with sailors. It included Islamic Asian myths transported to Europe along with the skins:
The kings of Marmin began to believe that souls were immortal a few years ago, induced by no other argument than that they saw that a certain most beautiful small bird never rested upon the ground nor upon anything that grew upon it; but they sometimes saw it fall dead upon the ground from the sky. And as the Mahometans, who travelled to those parts for commercial purposes, told them that this bird was born in Paradise, and that Paradise was the abode of the souls of those who had died, these kings embraced the sect of Mahomet, because it promised wonderful things concerning the abode of souls. But they call the bird Mamuco Diata [Bird of God]. . .2
Accompanied by such fabulous accounts, these striking objects could hardly fail to become something special. In the 1540s, more bird of paradise skins began to trickle into Europe from Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels returning from the East Indies. The skins, most of which bore the iridescent green and velvet brown plumage of the  greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda), were prepared for trade, limbs  removed, and rapidly acquired by aristocratic collectors for their curiosity collections.
There were still a relatively small number of specimens scattered in a variety of collections across Europe. Apart from the collections of the Cardinal of Salzburg and Charles V in Spain, the German humanist Conrad Peutinger owned a specimen, as did the Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger. The apothecary-collector Francesco Calzolari in Verona had a specimen of a chamaeleon aereus described in his collection catalogue, and the German physician-botanist Melchior Weiland had acquired a specimen during his travels in the Levant. The skins fetched painfully high prices on the open market: a 1550 pamphlet from Nuremberg advertised a skin of the birds known to the Greeks as “apodes” (“without feet”), on sale for the price of 800 thalers, equivalent to a year’s salary for a university scholar or skilled musician.
Very little was published about these rare birds until the middle of the sixteenth century. Even so, it didn’t take long for their depictions in books of emblems, natural philosophies, and in many other genres to transform them into angelic, floating creatures. These images were based in part on the Islamic myths published by Transylvanus and the fact that the “Orient” has been seen as an exotic paradise full of wonders and riches for hundreds of years. It was almost no surprise that the East should turn out to be a Paradisal land full of spices and jewel-like birds.
Few authors actually saw the bird of paradise skins, so closely did collectors keep them from public view. And none, of course, saw the living “angels” they described. The ideas that the birds were like angels did not in fact originate with the legless nature of the skins. This leglessness was used, rather to support the fantastical life histories that authors imagined. The birds of paradise were literally mythologised.
The first pivotal account of the manucodiata was in the Historiae Animalium (1551-58) of Swiss naturalist and physician Conrad Gessner. The five volumes of this gargantuan work followed the Aristotelian structure of the natural world and is a  seminal example of a Renaissance encyclopedia.  It combined image with text for the first time, including about 1200 woodcuts.  The complete “history” of each alphabetically-ordered creature was arranged in a set of lettered thematic sections such as synonyms, form, and uses. The size of each entry depended on the volume of extant material on it: newer creatures merited smaller entries than well-known ones.
In order to form a complete history of the birds, Gessner brought together as many sources as he could.  He included one of the first extant scholarly descriptions of a bird of paradise, found in the expansive De Subtilitate (1550), a book by the Italian mathematician and astrologer Jerome Cardan. Cardan reasoned that, because these birds were never seen alive and could not land without feet, they must exist perpetually airborne in the highest reaches of the sky. Cardan argued that nothing solid was ever found in their bodies, so they must be like the mythical rhyntace, “a little Persian Bird which has no excrement, but is all full of fat inside, and the creature is thought to live upon air and dew”. He also suggested that males had a cavity in their backs in which females laid eggs and incubated them, and he coined the Latinate term Manucodiata, drawn from the Malay name Mamuco diuata (birds of God). Gessner also used the description by French naturalist Pierre Belon, who, in his L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (1555), described the headdresses of the Janissaries he had seen in the Levant. They contained “plumes of a bird called the Rhintace . . .” from “a small creature of which only the skin is left” that he believed “may be the Phoenix”.
On the basis of these and other accounts, Gessner developed some marvelous ideas about the life histories of the birds. He suggested that these “Lufftvogels” (birds of the air) were effortlessly suspended by their haloes of plumes. Gessner imagined several  uses for these hair-like projections, or cirri —- the naked shafts projecting beyond the rest of the feathers. He speculated that the birds might use them to hang from tree branches when they were tired. They might also be vital to the birds’ love lives: Gessner envisaged couples entwining their cirri together when mating, and as the female sat atop the male to brood her eggs amongst the clouds. He maintained that the fatigue of unending flight might in fact be taken away by the birds’ constant movement, like the perpetual movement of a clock pendulum. He argued, though, that they could not possibly live only on pure air or ether. It was far too thin to sustain anything. They were birds, after all.
Gessner often called upon correspondents to get information or images he needed. Conrad Peutinger in Augsberg sent Gessner a report and drawing of his own personal specimen to be the basis for the woodcut illustration featured in Gessner’s book. The skin in the resulting woodcut is apparently legless but lacks the hair-like projections that figured so in Gessner’s theories and  were clear in other contemporary images such as Calzolari’s.
Gessner’s work was source material for many later publications, including Bolognese apothecary Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historia (1599). Aldrovandi had several skins in his collection and differentiated four different species of manucodiata on this basis: Manucodiata prima, secunda, cirrata, and hippomanucodiata, each depicted in woodcuts drinking dew and floating amongst clouds. However, in his text, Aldrovandi argued that the birds could not possibly live on dew alone and conjectured that their “sturdy beaks” were very like those of woodpeckers, and “very fit to strike insects”. He also suggested that the cirri might aid “swifter flight” rather than being used in mating.
The birds certainly weren’t confined to natural histories. They were used in many books of emblems such as Joachim Camerarius’ Symbolarum et emblematum (1596), encapsulating ideas of spiritual ascension, lofty thinking, and restless, mercurial thought with their unending flight.
The birds, with their elaborate plumes and flighty nature, were even used as emblems of the fickle and coquettish nature of vain and richly adorned women. They also made it into the stars: Dutch astronomer Petrus Planchius enshrined the bird of paradise in a new southern constellation, Paradysvogel Apis Indica, in his 1598 celestial globe.
In art, the birds’ exotic and ascendant nature was powerfully symbolic. In Jacques Linard’s painting The Five Senses and the Four Elements (1627), for example, a bird of paradise skin is depicted as if it is flying out of the window to escape the chaos of the study. It acts as part of an alchemical allegory, symbolising the pure aerial elements: these birds were too close to the heavens to be contaminated with the exigencies of the everyday world.
In Roelandt Savery’s Landscape with Birds (1628), the birds are comet-like streaks in the sky, far above the terrestrial waterfowl and songbirds.
From the early seventeenth century some European naturalists got access to new kinds of skins that possessed legs. Several wrote long and disparaging refutations of earlier authors and their belief in legless wonders. The birds of paradise were becoming terrestrialised, just birds, no longer the ethereal angels they had been.
Yet the exoticism and moral connotations of the birds-as-angels meant that these images did not die out. Depictions of the birds were everywhere . . . — in paintings, religious texts, allegories, even in some newly-published retrograde natural histories. It was not only that the birds had become a geographical symbol of the wondrous East or a moral symbol of a pure existence, but that the image of monstrous legless birds fascinated people. This has not lessened today; they continue to enthrall, perhaps even more so as fabulous natural wonders than angelic impossibilities.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Natalie Lawrence