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Exquisite Rot
Spalted Wood and the Lost Art of Intarsia
By Daniel Elkind
May 16, 2018

The technique of intarsia — the fitting together of pieces of intricately cut wood to make often complex images — has produced some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of Renaissance craftsmanship. Daniel Elkind explores the history of this masterful art, and how an added dash of colour arose from a most unlikely source: lumber ridden with fungus.

There is a tale, perhaps apocryphal, in which Fra Damiano da Bergamo looks on as emperor Charles V — motto: Plus Ultra, “further beyond” — sands away at an area of intarsiated wood from a recently completed choir, a section inlaid with a variety of colored woods to appear as one unbroken composition. In Silas Kopf’s version, it is Fra Damiano’s stunning work at the Church of San Domenico in Bologna which has the emperor so mesmerized:
Charles thought the work was so beautifully done that it couldn’t possibly be made of pieces of wood, as he had been told, but rather that it had been painted. To assuage his curiosity, he took his sword and chopped out a bit of the panel. Confirming that the picture was in fact composed of wood pieces, Charles asked to meet the man who could do such work and was taken to Damiano’s studio. Apparently still not sure that the intarsia was not treated with paints, Damiano pulled out a hand plane and passed it over the panel he was working on, thereby shaving off the top layer of wood.1
Despite the obvious talent of the intarsiatori, the Florentine polymath Giorgio Vasari — considered by many the first art historian — famously dismissed their meticulous craft as “counterfeit painting”, which has “always been exercised by persons possessing more patience than skill in design.”  Though “praiseworthy and masterly”, wooden inlay was nevertheless an extravagant waste of time, wrote Vasari, doomed to a short life “because of worms and fire”, noteworthy only insofar as it demonstrated the Renaissance fascination with perspective.2  In other words, a curiosity like pastiglia boxes or mother of pearl.
At best, Vasari and his contemporaries considered the so-called decorative arts derivative of the fine arts, painting and sculpture. But painting in wood is in many ways more complicated than painting on wood. Rather than fabricating objects from a single source, the art of intarsia is the art of mosaic, of picking the right tone, of sourcing only properly seasoned lumber from mature trees and adapting materials intended for one context to another. Painting obscures the origins of a given material, whereas intarsia retains the original character of the wood grain — whose knots and whorls are as individual as the islands and deltas of friction ridges that constitute the topography of a fingerprint — while forming a new image. From a distance, the whole appears greater than the sum of its parts; up close, one can appreciate the heterogeneity of the components.
The aforementioned Charles, for example, had his motto inlaid on one of the flaps of an impressive writing cabinet built for him in around 1532 — a reification of his “invincible” reign and Spain’s recent success in the New World.3 More ornamental than practical, the “Plus Oultra” escritorio, now located at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has been called “an expression of the universal Christian empire of Charles V and the sacred imperialism of the Spanish Austrias.”4 Through this piece, we can trace not only the path intarsia traveled in Europe as it migrated north and west, but also its trajectory from the religious sphere to the secular, from totem of state to luxury item.
From the beginning, intarsia has served as a projection of imperial singularity and superiority. According to Maurice Sven Dimand, the first specialized curator of Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum, the technique arrived in the cathedrals of Europe via Andalusia and Sicily from the mosques and minarets of North Africa, where, due to the prohibition on graven images, it was useful in effecting complex calligraphic patterns and tessellations.5 More than mere ornamentation, the intricate tiling served as a unifying design element, as much a part of the architecture as a pillar or qubba (dome). One can still feel transported before lonely door panels and orphaned minbars (pulpits), as one marvels at the way these features summon the ineffable through sacred geometry from the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia (ca. 836) to the Alhambra in Spain.
The Gubbio studiolo (ca. 1478–82), considered perhaps the quintessential Italian Renaissance object and best known example of intarsia paneling, consists of a private study built for the contemplative benefit of Federico da Montefeltro. Montefeltro was undoubtedly one of the major condottiere of his day, a well-connected and well-read mercenary-entrepreneur nicknamed “the Light of Italy” who had another study built at his palace in Urbino where he would go to disappear “when he wanted to withdraw alone for serious study or with a privileged guest for profound conversation.”6 The duke possessed two things for which he was renowned: a library said to be second only to the pope’s, and one of the most famous Renaissance profiles — a big, beefy head with a tiny, broken nose — immortalised in a portrait by Piero della Francesca, author of the first major scientific treatise on perspective, De prospectiva pingendi (ca. 1475), one of the treasures of the duke’s library.
The panels portray various souvenirs of the duke’s wide reading in the arts and sciences, symbols of his earthly power, and pictorial allegories featuring the Liberal Arts. Pieces of the panels have gone missing, but in the intervening and fragmented lettered frieze, gorgeously rendered in gold Roman capitals on blue ground, some clues to the connection between the panels remain. As reconstructed by the art historian Olga Raggio, the full inscription would have read:
You see how the eternal students of the Venerable Mother/Men exalted in learning and in genius/Fall forward, suppliantly with bared head/and bended knee, before [the face of their parent]./With the help of Justice, reverend Piety prevails/and none regrets having submitted to his foster mother.7
Inspired by the New Testament and uninhibited by Mosaic proscription, craftsmen in the city of Siena began to introduce flora and fauna into their compositions in the 14th century. Figures and faces became common by the late fifteenth century and, by the early sixteenth century, intarsiatori in Florence were making use of a wide variety of dyes in addition to natural hardwoods to mimic the full spectrum from the lightest (spindlewood) to medium (walnut) and dark (bog oak) — with the tantalizing exception of an aquamarine color somewhere between green and blue which required treating wood with “copper acetate (verdigris) and copper sulfate (vitriol).”8
As Italian intarsia made its way north from Siena to Nuremberg and, during the early sixteenth century, to Augsburg in southern Germany, where it became known as “gesägte intarsia (sawn intarsia)”, it nevertheless “remained a closely guarded guild technique.”9 It was in Augsburg that naturally spalted wood — that is, wood that has been stained naturally, most often by some species of fungus — first became a regular source for intarsia work and the color palette was at last completed. Furnishings that featured slivers of griinfaule or “green oak” were especially prized by master cabinetmakers like Bartholomew Weisshaupt and coveted by the elite of the Holy Roman Empire.10
Breaking open rotting hardwood logs to reveal delicate veins of turquoise and aquamarine, craftsmen discovered that the green in green oak was the result of colonization by the green elf-cup fungus, Chlorociboria aeruginascens, whose tiny teal fruiting bodies grow on felled, barkless conifers and hardwoods like oak and beech across much of Europe, Asia, and North America. Fungal rot usually devalues wood, but green oak happened to fill a lucrative niche in a burgeoning luxury trade, and that made it, for a time at least, as precious as some rare metals. During the reign of Charles V, when the Hapsburgs ruled both Spain and Germany, a lively trade in these intarsia pieces sprang up between the two countries.
C. aeruginascens is an ascomycete, or sac fungi — aeruginascens means “becoming blue-green” — that is ideal for intarsia work because it grows on wood that has already been decomposed by white-rot fungi, the first-responders of the forest. (Timber has to rest before it can be used and was usually left on the forest floor for weeks or months at a time after being cut.) Arriving late to the party, so to speak, the teal fungus begins to spread throughout the wood in search of sugars, colonizing first the ray cells and then the vessels and fibers while releasing a secondary metabolite called xylindein, which is responsible for the brilliant turquoise color. Unlike dyes, which tend to concentrate in the vessels and fibers rather than ray cells, each piece of xylindein-stained wood appears uniquely, idiosyncratically mottled.11 And due to its stubborn refusal to oxidize or fade — a desirable trait known as colorfastness — it is also a mycological rarity: one of the few inedible mushroom-derived products to become a commodity.
Of course, blue-green is not the only shade of spalted wood: there’s red stain (Scytalidium cuboideum), yellow stain (Scytalidium ganodermophthorum), and many others. We also know that “legname verde” was first used by Florentine craftsmen to imitate natural elements like leaves, trees, water, green porphyry, and parakeet feathers, and that it appears in details of the Gubbio studiolo. We know that Fra Giovanni’s pupil Raffaele da Brescia used it to invigorate landscapes parched of variety by too much alder and ash, while Antonio Barili and Giuliano da Maiano used it to differentiate important details like book locks, textiles, and the vestments of the Virgin herself. So might there be other examples of intarsia containing C. aeruginascens hiding in plain sight?
In 1992, Robert Blanchette and his team received permission to analyze a green-stained panel from the Gubbio studiolo for the presence of fungal hyphae.12 This panel and another, attributed to Fra Giovanni, both turned out to be pieces of poplar that showed telltale signs of spalting along with the absence of any artificial pigments. (Destructive sampling of antiques is rarely allowed, so testing must consist of a visual comparison of key elements.) More recently, two researchers from the Department of Wood Science and Engineering at Oregon State University used the noninvasive method to extend the scope of analysis beyond Italy and Germany. Focusing on Spanish collections, they were able to determine that bureaus manufactured in Augsburg during the sixteenth century contained pieces of spalted wood, while “Spanish and Italian intarsia artifacts from the 1800s were found to only contain dyed wood.”13
With the advent of inorganic dyes the demand for spalted wood declined and the laborious practice of sourcing it largely fell out of favor. Though it would pop up now and again throughout history, particularly in Regency-era England in the form of Tunbridge ware — souvenir boxes with wooden inlay from the spa town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent — its heyday was past.14 One of those preindustrial alchemies like cochineal, a female scale insect from the New World that was at one time a valuable source of carmine — the color in the walls and doors of Van Gogh’s famous bedroom at Arles — now largely banished to the cabinet of curiosities.15 Though it seems like the mystery has evaporated and little is left to the imagination, it nevertheless strains credulity to seriously consider that the eyes of the parakeet which stare back at us from the walls of a Renaissance man cave may be the result — the wake — of a hungry fungus.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.


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Divining the Witch of York
Propaganda and Prophecy
By Ed Simon
October 24, 2018

Said to be spawn of the devil himself and possessed with great powers of prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire’s answer to Nostradamus. Ed Simon looks into how, regardless of whether this prophetess witch actually existed or not, the legend of Mother Shipton has wielded great power for centuries — from the turmoil of Tudor courts, through the frictions of civil war, to the spectre of Victorian apocalypse.

In 1488 during the reign of Henry VII, one year after the Dominican Heinrich Kramer wrote his notorious witch-finding manual Malleus Maleficarum, an adolescent girl named Agatha Soothtell gave birth in a cave among the dales and moors of Yorkshire to her daughter Ursula, supposedly conceived by the Devil himself. Ironically it was there in “God’s Own Country” that young Agatha would raise her demonic charge, both of them forced to live in the cave where Ursula was born. The site that would be visited by pilgrims for centuries afterwards, making it arguably England’s first tourist attraction, was known as much for the strange calcifying waters of its subterranean whirlpool as for its medieval Satanic nativity.
Most sources claimed that Ursula died during the rule of Elizabeth I in 1561, but with eight decades separating her supposed death and the first appearance of her name in print, it’s fair to assume a degree of invention in her biography. Despite her legendary ugliness (Ursula’s seventeenth-century biographer described her as “a thing so strange in an infant, that no age can parallel”1), at the age of twenty-four she married a carpenter named Toby Shipton, and it is to posterity that she would come to be known as “Mother Shipton”. A less appropriate surname, because as “Smith” and “Taylor” indicate profession, so too did “Soothtell”. Mother Shipton would become the most famed of soothe tellers in English history, renowned for her prophecies and used as a symbolic familiar in the art of divination for generations, the very constructed personage of the seer, a work of poetry unto herself. As scholar Darren Oldridge writes, “Unlike other ‘ancient prophets’ who were known by their words alone, Shipton emerged as a personality in her own right”.2
It is likely at least some of Mother Shipton’s predictions were invented long after she lived, her prophetic couplets revised and edited to conform to later events, whether Cardinal Wolsey’s death, the Great Fire of London, or the Crimean War. Details of her biography, her writing, and her very countenance are uncertain. The prophetess herself may have been a later invention. Yet Mother Shipton, England’s Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century Sibyl, the Yorkshire prophetess, the Knaresborough witch whose crooked face has stared out from prints hanging on occultist’s walls and in the names of country pubs since the initial printing of her predictions in 1641, should serve as a potent point of reflection for what exactly we talk about when we talk about prophecies.
Most of the major events in British history found expression in some pamphlet or compendium of Mother Shipton’s predictions, albeit backdated retrospectively with great convenience. There is Elizabeth I’s reformation: “A maiden Queen shall reign anon. / The Papal power shall bear no sway, / Rome’s creed shall hence be swept away.” Mother Shipton supposedly saw those broken ships of the Spanish Armada off the English and Irish coast: “The Western monarch’s wooden horses / Shall be destroyed by Drake’s forces” (a rare case of a prediction specifically naming a historical figure, which a skeptic might use to question said prophecy’s authenticity). It was claimed that the witch had a vision of Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution: “a widowed Queen / In England shall be headless seen”, as well as the punishment of Essex for his rebellion: “An Earl without a head be found”, and the ascension of the Scottish King James VI to the throne in Westminster: “Soon after shall the English Rose / Unto a male her place dispose.”3 And then there’s the Great Fire of London in 1666, Mother Shipton having supposedly claimed that “it comes against London . . . what a good city this was, none in the world comparable to it, and now there’s scare a house left,”4 which apparently led the diarist, raconteur, and naval secretary Samuel Pepys to write “Mother Shipton’s word is out”.5
As mentioned, some scholars have argued that she is a complete fiction. There are those, however, that argue she was in some way an actual person, embellished through local tradition into a folk legend. There is at least one clue earlier than the seventeenth century which indicates that the prophetess may be based in more than pure invention. In 1537, as Catholic rebels in Yorkshire rebelled against Henry VIII and his dissolution of the monasteries, the assailed king wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk in which he disdainfully refers to a “witch of York”. It is perhaps the earliest reference to what may be the real Mother Shipton. As the anonymous author in an 1868 edition of Notes and Queries concluded, “Although the fact of the existence of Mother Shipton rests wholly upon Yorkshire tradition, she can scarcely be regarded as a myth.”6
The British Library’s earliest listed publication about Mother Shipton is the anonymously penned 1641 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the raigne of King Henry the Eighth, fortelling the death of Cardinall Wolsey, etc., with fifteen subsequent texts in the seventeenth century (including a play), and dozens more published in the intervening centuries. One particular title was crucial to the embellishment of her myth, her biography as written by the Irish novelist Richard Head in 1667. Notes and Queries described Head as “the notorious Richard Head, author of several works of loose description.”7 His oeuvre included the erotic poetry of Venus Cabinet Unlock’d, the earliest slang dictionary The Canting Academy, a work of true crime about a notorious highwayman called Jackson’s Recantation, and, most significantly, a picaresque novel titled The English Rogue. That last title would become the first major fiction in English to be translated into a foreign tongue and would influence authors such as Daniel Defoe, who was inspired to write Moll Flanders based on Head’s example.
Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton was responsible for the majority of invented biographical details, building upon the bare narrative scaffolding of dozens of popular pamphlets. From Head’s imagination came details such as Agatha’s demonic wedding feast with Satan, accounts of magical feats performed by Ursula in front of worthies such as Cardinal Wolsey, and, most enduringly, the graphic and purple description of Mother Shipton’s physical appearance, which occupies hundreds of words, describing her as “very morose and big-boned”, with “very great goggling, but sharp and firey eyes; her nose of an incredible and unproportionable length”. Head then goes on for several sentences describing said nose in magnificently baroque prose, its “many crooks and turnings,” and its adornment with “many strange pimples of divers colours, as red and blue mixed, which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre to the affrighted spectators in the dead time of the night, that one of them confessed several times, that her nurse needed no other light” to assist her in the birth of the prophetess. Head offers similarly purple descriptions of Mother Shipton’s cheeks, her teeth, her mouth, her neck, her shoulders, her legs, and her toes, telling us that it was as if “her body had been screwed together piece after piece, and not rightly placed”. In short, Head rather cruelly makes clear what Mother Shipton looked like — a witch.8 Although not the origin of the Shipton myth, Head’s portrait is its most enduring instance, and it has almost single-handedly propelled  Mother Shipton’s rise into full-on prophetic stardom.
“The prophet is, first and foremost, a media phenomenon”, writes historian Jonathan Green in Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550, and if Mother Shipton was anything, it was a veritable media phenomenon.9 A beneficiary of cheap print, her stock soared with the collapse of the licensing laws of the 1640s, which enabled a deluge of pamphlets ascribing to her any number of potentially contradictory predictions. Pamphleteers during the years of the English Civil War took ample opportunity to enlist Mother Shipton as a convenient authority in propagandistic causes, both Parliamentarian and Royalist. Scholar Harry Rusche, in the English Historical Review, writes that
Virtually all prophecies possessed a potential propaganda value that could be exploited by clever interpretation or a slight revision, and no prophetic utterance, ancient or recent, was so innocent that it could not be ingeniously twisted to bear upon contemporary religious and political issues.10
Such invoking of prophecies during times of crisis, writes historian Madeline Dodds, was “usually to demonstrate that some drastic change, either desired or already accomplished, had been foreseen by the sages of the past.”11 And this was often achieved by the retroactive backdating of prophecies, something certainly true for Head writing during the years of Restoration. Consider the explicitly Royalist gloss of the following, in which Mother Shipton “predicts” the regicide of Charles I, all via the pen of Head writing eighteen years after the actual event: “Then shall the Council great assemble, / Who shall make great and small to tremble, / The White King then (O grief to see!) / By wicked hands shall murdered be.” Head informs his readers that Shipton saw the rule of Charles’ son, “predicted” in this pamphlet published seven years into his rule, for “fate to England shall restore / A king to reign as heretofore.”
By contrast, the 1641 Mother Shipton pamphlet evidences Parliamentarian sympathies, presenting startlingly accurate predictions about the future rather than only backdating events that had already occurred. It is claimed that “Wars shall begin in the Spring, / Much war to England it shall bring: / Then shall the Ladies cry well-away, / That ever we liv’d to see this day.”12 Though written with a sense of melancholia, there is also a sentiment of inevitability and the accurate foresight of coming civil war (though written after the Bishop’s War had already seen Scotland and England at blows). Moving from verse to prose, Mother Shipton prophecies that despite the coming strife, ultimately “there shall never be warfare again, nor any more Kings or Queens,” a startlingly radical conclusion written some eight years before Charles I would place his neck on the block. Rusch notes, “Whether this was specifically meant as parliamentarian propaganda is difficult to say” and that 1641 “seems too early for this kind of speculation except in the most extreme factions.” Yet whether the pamphlet originated in those extreme factions (or was simply accurate divination!), Rusche does observe that the publication “came to be recognized as good material for the parliamentarians. . . [and] was subsequently published by those opposed to the principles of monarchy.”13
If, during the politically tumultuous 1640s, the use of Mother Shipton’s prophecies centred on justifying or rebelling against rule, then later versions saw a different focus. Her most famous prophetic couplet, which claims that “The world to an end shall come, / In eighteen hundred and eighty one”,14 first appeared in an 1862 edition of her prophecies edited by Charles Hindley, a Victorian writer who was known for his compilations of vulgar speech, such as his omnibus Curiosities of Street Literature. His edition of Mother Shipton’s predictions reinvigorated the legends about the Yorkshire oracle, and if Head’s biography is one node in her myth, then Hindley supplied the other. Clifford Musgrave writes in Life in Brighton, from the Earliest Times to the Present that Hindley’s ominous apocalyptic verse “had an extraordinary effect on the popular imagination, especially among the poor educated and more credulous people all over the countryside.” According to Musgrave, many of these people “deserted their homes and spent nights praying in the fields, churches and chapels.”15 So pervasive was the fear that the world would end in 1881 that the British Library employed William Henry Harrison (not to be confused with the US president) to write an exhaustive debunking of the legend titled Mother Shipton Investigated. Harrison quotes the editor of an 1873 edition of Notes and Queries who explained that “Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy quoted”, thus demonstrating once and for all the complete fabrication that was the Sibyl’s most famous and frightening prediction.16
It is not only fear that motivates allegiance to such prophecies; involved here also is a yearning for meaning and significance — the idea perhaps that our own lives could be of such importance that a Tudor oracle may have dreamt of us. As James Sharpe explains in Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England, prophecies “helped many people make sense of the world and cosmos in which they existed, and helped them deal with at least some of the problems they experienced”, even when such predictions were of apocalyptic bent.17 Consider not just the concluding apocalyptic couplet, but the full prophecy presented by Hindley, where he has the Sibyl say that “Through hills man shall ride, / And no horse be at his side. / Under water men shall walk, / Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk. / In the air men shall be seen, / . . . Iron in the water shall float, / As easily as a wooden boat.”18 It is difficult to read her couplets and not imagine these prophecies rendered in such pleasing anaphora, repetition, and tricolon, to be eerily aligned to our own present, evoking cars or scuba diving, airplanes, or cruise ships. Perhaps Hindley had the telegraph in mind, but it’s hard not to see a reflection of ourselves in the black mirror of our smartphones and laptops as you read that “Around the world thoughts shall fly / In the twinkling of an eye.”19
Looking for such insight in ancient divinations betrays a poignant sentiment: that in past prophecies we hope not just for predictive power, but also for evidence of a connection with times long past — a sense that we are not so alone, cut-off and adrift in our particular age, but rather characters in a narrative penned long ago. More than being simple prediction, prophecy seems a strange literary tense that confuses past, present, and future, and inserts those not yet born into the writings of antiquity. Green explains that “prophecy involves; above all, the claim, made by the prophet and understood by his or her followers, to be the middle participant in a two-part conversation.”20 The scouring of prophecies, pamphlets, letters, marginalia, ephemera, and almanacs of those prophetic mages is driven by the desire for a radical, sweet empathy imparted to us by our long-dead ancestors. Reading Nostradamus, or those weird sisters the Sibylline oracles, or some other mystic, seer, or psychic is to wish that we could speak to the past, that our dialogues with the dead are not one-sided and that perhaps they cared about us.
While scholars have written extensively about more respectable (and verifiably real) astrologers and alchemists who mastered the necromantic arts, from John Dee in the sixteenth century to Simon Forman and William Lilly in the seventeenth (the latter an author of a pamphlet about Mother Shipton), the “cunning-woman” of Yorkshire has remained the province of psychics and tarot card readers, hazily remembered as just another antique prophetess. Distinctions between those gentlemen with their grimoires, scrying mirrors, and alchemical tables and the hag of Yorkshire might not be as historically clear as could be assumed. Sharpe explains that a “distinction between witchcraft on the one hand and magic and sorcery on the other proves impossible”, and that “medieval and early modern commentators tended to jumble the terms [of witchcraft and magic] together happily enough.”21 Certainly there has been a rich and full investigation of witchcraft by social historians over the past half-century, yet Mother Shipton herself awaits her full due -- a debt which may continue to be deferred so long as proof of her existence eludes us. Despite much (or even perhaps all) of her biography and her supposed fortunes being the result of hoax, invention, conjecture, and fiction, there is a cracked truth in her example. For even in her most famed, fake, and falsified predictions we are given the opportunity to contemplate this strange thing of prophecy, in both its propaganda and its poetry, while also perhaps encountering the witch of York on her own terms, seeing predictions for what they are: a weird type of participatory literature.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 24, 2018

author: Ed Simon

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Elephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

By Dániel Margócsy
November 5, 2018

Does each species have an optimal form? An ideal beauty that existed prior to the Fall? These were questions that concerned both artists and breeders alike in the 17th century. Dániel Margócsy on the search for a menagerie of perfect prelapsarian geometry.

What does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent. In the 1510s, an elephant named Hanno was brought to Portugal from India and then presented as a gift from King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X. In the 1550s, Suleiman traveled through the Iberian peninsula and Italy, died in Vienna, and was stuffed and exhibited in Munich for centuries. A couple of years after Suleiman’s death, Emmanuel traveled through the Low Countries and Austria, and the list goes on, relentlessly, until we reach Hansken, the elephant that Rembrandt famously pictured, and whose skeleton is still exhibited in Florence’s Museum of Natural History.
Before de Passe, no one thought to establish an ideal norm for what the average or canonic elephant might look like. Not that Passe’s aim was to synthesize previous sightings of the animal. While an extensive number of elephant prints survive from the sixteenth century, it is unlikely that he was familiar with all of them. Instead, Passe relied on the rules of geometry. With the use of squares and circles, he constructed an animal that conformed to the laws of mathematical proportions and published the results in his book ’t Light der teken en schilderkonst.
By the 1620s, artists had long used the laws of proportions to construct human figures. Their aims were often twofold. The use of squares and circles allowed apprentice artists to quickly learn how to sketch convincing figures, and it also helped establish a standard and idealized understanding of what the human body should look like. Most of us are familiar with Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man, which illustrates the idea that the relationship between the body parts of the ideal human being could be expressed in simple, mathematical terms. From the early days of the Renaissance, art theorists such as Albrecht Dürer discussed in great detail how the ideal human being’s height was equivalent to seven, eight, or nine times the length of his head, and how the length of the arm, the legs, the chest, and other body parts could also be expressed as integer multiples (or simple fractions) of the head.
Painters applied the same insights to the study of animals. Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil famously pictures a geometrically constructed horse, and he even intended to publish a whole treatise on the topic, which was pirated soon after his death in 1528 by Hans Sebald Beham. Beham’s Maß oder proporcion der ross would soon be followed by the model books of the German printmakers Erhard Schön and Hans Lautensack. Each of these artists came up with a subtly different solution to picturing a proportionate horse. For Beham, the abstract horse could be constructed in a few steps, starting with a large square, divided into nine small squares. Into this grid he introduced numerous smaller geometrical forms and then inscribed his ideal horse into the carefully measured plane.
While Beham was interested in establishing the mathematical proportions of the lateral horse across a plane, Erhard Schön extended these considerations to three dimensions. Unlike Beham and Schön, Lautensack did not think that the horse needed to be inscribed in a previously established geometrical plane or space. One could simply construct it by drawing two circles of equal size next to each other, one for the frontal part and one for the buttocks, and then by drawing a set of straight lines that determined the length of the legs, the neck, and the head.
Passe’s innovation was to extend the repertory of animal figures to elephants as well as to bears, lions, or rabbits. Yet, for Passe, as for his predecessors, the question of the horse was even more pressing than that of the elephant. Building upon his predecessors, he carefully analyzed the proportions of the horse in a series of images, both in two and three dimensions, paying special attention to the shape of the head.
The geometry of the horse was crucial for Passe, whose personal life and profession brought him into daily contact with the animals. He was earning his living by offering lessons at the renowned riding academy of Antoine Pluvinel in the old palace of the Louvre. One may venture the thought that his students were probably more interested in riding than in limning elephants. Passe was also the illustrator of Pluvinel’s Maneige Royal, the crowning achievement and theoretical condensation of the riding master’s work; he saw it through the press after the author’s untimely death. Our Flemish artist peppered the Maneige Royal with images of perfectly proportionate horses, on occasion explicitly borrowing from his ’t Light der teken en schilderkonst.
Considering Passe in his time, his focus on horses makes a lot of sense. Horses were, after all, the most important animal in the early modern period. They were the primary means of transportation, a significant source of agricultural labour, and, for aristocrats, a prime fashion object. Picturing them, therefore, was an essential part of any artist’s repertoire. Moreover, horses were highly diverse. By the end of the sixteenth century, Europeans were familiar with dozens of different breeds, ranging from Frisian, Burgundy, and Crete horses to Barbs, Turks, and Arabs. When the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) was commissioned to portray the horses in the stable of Don Juan d’Austria, he was able to picture forty different breeds, including Armenians, Apulians, and Saxons. While in those days, nobody made a distinction between Asian and African elephants (even Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century founder of taxonomy, would remain ignorant of their differences), Passe was surely familiar with the dozens of horse breeds that his customers were riding.
Pictures of proportionate horses offered the hope of establishing an ideal type for the species. Early in the sixteenth century, Lautensack had already pondered this possibility. He admitted that his geometric horses could not be representative of all breeds. While Italian horses were “rather handsome, with round, broad bodies and a small head”, the Turkish horses were “scrawny”, and the bodies and haunches of Frisian horses were large and heavy. Lautensack’s beautiful, proportionate horse could stand in for a beautiful race, such as the Italian, or posit an as yet unattainable ideal, but it did not represent the species in all its diversity.
Yet if not all horses followed the ideal rules of geometry, could they be remade to conform? This was the key issue for horse breeders in the decades before Passe came onto the scene. Consider, for instance, the polymath Thomas Blundeville from Elizabethan England. Like Lautensack, Blundeville’s aim was to determine how the geometrical abstraction of the ideal horse related to the observed variability amongst actual horses. What made a species a species?
Blundeville’s solution appears to have relied on the idea of an ancestral horse from whom all other horses descended and diverged. This idea is rooted in the story of Noah’s flood. In the Ark each species was represented by only one couple, and it was their offspring, dispersing in all directions, that came to populate the Earth once the waters had subsided. As Blundeville wrote, focusing on humans,
though God almightie hath created all men of one selfe bloode, and that all doe take their beginning from the Arke of Noah, and that all men be one selfe qualitie and shape of the bodie, yet they differ in greatnesse, in proportion of members, and in colour.
As animals multiplied and dispersed after the Flood, their size, proportions, and colour began to diverge. It was thus imperative to figure out which breed had the best, most beautiful proportions. In his Foure Chiefest Offices belonging to Horsemanship, Blundeville investigated the characteristics of horses from Turkey, Barbary, and Europe, and concluded that the courser of Naples was the best, as “his limmes are so well proportioned in euerie point”. Because of this quality, the Neapolitan horse stood out from the rest, and Blundeville proposed to import this breed to England to rejuvenate local stock.
But why was the Neapolitan endowed with perfect proportions? The answer built on the commonly accepted Galenic theory of four humours and its relationship to climate. Following tradition, Blundeville believed that the external proportions and the behavior of the horse reflected the internal proportions of the four bodily humours of blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile. Every animal’s body and character was determined by the particular humoural mix of these four fluids. In turn, it was the climate of a land that determined the humoural make-up of a creature. In hot and dry lands, creatures tended to have an overabundance of yellow bile. In wet and cold lands, like England, creatures tended to have too much phlegm and, as a result, had a rather phlegmatic character. Clearly, the land with the best, most moderate climate produced the best horses, and what could beat the balmy weather of the bay of Naples? That was the reason why the Neapolitan courser was perfect, beautiful, healthy, and strong, ready to withstand any adversity. As Blundeville wrote,
the Napolitan although he be bred under a hotter climat, yet that region is very temperate of it self, and so fruitful, as it is called the Garden, or Paradise of Itale: and the Horses there bredde, be of so strong and healthful complexion, as they wil not quaile wheresoeuer they go: and that they prosper so wel heere in this land, as in any other foyraine country.
Blundeville probably did not call the city of Naples the “Paradise of Itale” without a reason. The Bible had a huge influence on horse breeding in Elizabethan and Stuart England. In the 1610s, for instance, Michael Baret would argue that the ultimate aim of breeders was to restore the horse from the Garden of Eden. In the era before Darwinian evolution, horse breeders desperately needed a religious narrative that contradicted the widespread theory that species were permanent, which would have left little room for breeders’ attempts to improve upon nature. The Biblical story of the Fall of Man provided such an alternative. As Baret claimed, while the ideal, abstract, universal horse once existed in Paradise, the original sin of Adam and Eve brought corruption to this species as well. Horses devolved into various degenerate breeds and could not return to their Edenic condition without the intervention of breeders. Baret wrote that,
For although God gaue unto Horses such excellent qualities at their Creation, now are they changed in their use and are become disobedient to man, and therefore must bee subjected by Art.
The art of horsemanship could reverse the fall of humankind and create anew the perfect horse that obeyed humans — a horse that was proportionate, of course. Baret therefore set out to determine which horses were the most proportionate and most beautiful. Unlike Blundeville, he argued that the Edenic horse would be recreated by the careful, racial mixing of hot and dry Turkish or Barb stallions with cold and wet English mares. The combination of the humoural mixes of hotter and colder climates would lead to a new balance manifest in a perfectly shaped horse.
Baret’s suggestions about racial mixing had a large impact on English horsemanship. His contemporaries warmly embraced the idea that English horses could be improved by the injection of foreign blood. The author Gervase Markham imported one of the first Arabian horses, the Markham Arabian, during these very years, and he sold it to King James I. One hundred years later, renewed imports of Turks, Barbs, and Arabians led to the establishment of the English thoroughbred, which would remain the most valuable British horse into the present day. While early modern Englishmen increasingly protected their national identity by refraining from marriage with foreigners, they had no such compunction about having their mares bear children from stallions of distant lands.
Baret’s example has revealed the practical impact of artistic theories of proportion on contemporary breeding practices. Such a story shows that breeders and horse aficionados didn’t merely marvel at the skills of artists in producing naturalistic images. They also seriously engaged with the geometrical underpinnings of contemporary art theory and used these theories as a blueprint for their eugenic design.
Moreover, the reception of proportional theory among horse breeders might also find a resonance with the original context in which artists like Dürer, Passe, and Lautensack operated. From the vantage point of Baret, Dürer’s renowned print of Adam and Eve, with its perfectly proportionate humans, is a most appropriate manifestation of the ideal beauty of humankind before the Fall. Just before they have eaten from the apple, Adam and Eve still have a perfect internal balance of the four bodily humours (which, as some claim, are symbolized by the ox, rabbit, elk, and cat in the foreground). That is why their external proportions are so perfect, a characteristic that no other human will ever have, again.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 5, 2018

author: Dániel Margócs


text:
Darwin’s Polar Bear

By Michael Engelhard
February 21, 2018

Musings upon the whys and wherefores of polar bears, particularly in relation to their forest-dwelling cousins, played an important but often overlooked role in the development of evolutionary theory. Michael Engelhard explores.

As any good high school student should know, the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear, too, informed his grand theory.
Letting his fancy run wild in On the Origin of Species, the man accustomed to thinking in eons hypothesized “a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” Darwin based this speculation on a black bear the fur trader-explorer Samuel Hearne had observed swimming for hours, its mouth wide open, catching insects in the water. If the supply of insects were constant, Darwin thought, and no better-adapted competitors present, such a species could well take shape over time.
Systematic approaches to animals and their respective niches had long fertilized the intellectual landscape. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his Histoire Naturelle (published serially between 1749 and 1788) clearly distinguished a “land-bear” from a “sea-bear”. But his land-bear category was still muddled: it included a “white bear of the forest” as well as a brown bear. The count would have likely heard of polar bears in the boreal zone of southern Hudson Bay and he thought them a separate species: his “white bear of the forest”. In a 1754 publication of coloured plates used in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, his white land-bear looks different from his sea-bear, clearly showing the shorter neck and snout characteristic of brown bears and black bears. Perhaps the count knew about British Columbia’s white black bears or “spirit bears,” which could have confused him. (Other contributions by Buffon were significant. He discovered the first principle of biogeography, noticing that despite similar environments, different regions have distinct plants and animals.)
Buffon’s classifying of animals by region or habitat — as in the case of the two “different” white bears — prompted later naturalists to try to explain their origins and distribution as resulting from the characteristics of a place. Long before the idea of “habitat” began to infiltrate scientific discourse, the polar bear’s range and that of its prey had been linked to environmental conditions. Synthesizing the work of the Comte de Buffon and other naturalists, the Anglo-Irish Romantic writer Oliver Goldsmith thought the “Greenland bear” exceptional, because it is
the only animal that, by being placed in the coldest climate, grows larger than those that live in the temperate zones. All other species of animated nature diminish as they approach the poles, and seem contracted in their size by the rigours of the ambient atmosphere . . . . In short, all the variations of its figure and its colour seem to proceed from the coldness of the climate where it resides and the nature of the food it is supplied with.
Food availability does play a role in body mass, as does a region’s mean annual temperature, and while polar bears are not the only compact animal thriving in the Arctic, such biogeographic observations anticipated the theory of evolution and principles of ecology.
On Svalbard expeditions in the summers of 1858 and 1859, the Scottish nobleman-explorer Sir James Lamont watched polar bears frolic and dive. Intuiting that the animal had become what it is by living on seals, he deduced that the seal and the walrus must have originated first. Lamont assumed that polar bears had evolved from brown bears,
who, finding their means of subsistence running short, and pressed by hunger, ventured on the ice and caught some seals . . . so there is no impossibility in supposing that the brown bears, who by my theory were the progenitors of the present white bears, were accidentally driven over to Greenland and Spitzbergen by storms or currents.
The palest brown bears with the greatest amount of external fat, Lamont thought, would have had the best chance to survive and, therefore, reproduce. Upon his return, he wrote to Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Encouraged by Darwin’s response, Lamont elaborated upon walrus and polar bear evolution in his 1861 travelogue, Seasons with the Sea-horses. Darwin approved of Lamont’s hypothesis, and, because Lamont’s thinking on the subject predated the publication of On the Origin of Species, he later credited Lamont (as he did Alfred Russel Wallace) with independently conceiving the theory of natural selection.
The oldest polar bear fossils found are from Svalbard and northern Norway and have been dated at 115,000–130,000 years old, before the beginning of the last Ice Age. But some biologists think that polar bears and brown bears diverged from their common ancestor as early as 600,000 years ago. According to current research, polar bears evolved from brown bears that ventured onto the frozen ocean to stalk marine mammals, possibly after climate separated them from the main population. This was not a single, clean-cut departure, and repeated pairings between both species have turned the family tree into a thicket. Shrinking sea ice could force polar bears to mingle with their southern cousins again, particularly as the latter now travel farther north. In coastal Arctic Alaska, grizzlies have been observed feasting in the company of polar bears on bowhead whale carcasses. and interbreeding has been documented.
After he had been ridiculed for his musings on a future insect-eating cetacean bear, Darwin altered that passage in the second edition of Origin and removed it from subsequent ones. In a letter to the Irish algae specialist William Henry Harvey, Darwin complained how “The Bear case has been well laughed at, & disingenuously distorted by some into my saying that a bear could be converted into a whale”. Still, Darwin insisted that “there is no especial difficulty in a Bear’s mouth being enlarged to any degree useful to its changing habits, — no more difficulty than man has found in increasing the crop of the pigeon, by continued selection, until it is literally as big as whole rest of body.” Lamont’s observations and theories as well as later findings about polar bear evolution vindicated the eminent naturalist and his ursine thought experiment.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 21, 2018

author: Michael Engelhard


text:
Pods, Pots, and Potions
Putting Cacao to Paper in Early Modern Europe
By Christine Jones
December 7, 2017

Christine Jones explores the different ways the cacao tree has been depicted through history — from 16th-century codices to 18th-century botanicals — and what this changing iconography reveals about cacao’s journey into European culture.

Lauded as the “food of the gods” (Theobroma) by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1753, the cacao plant (Theobroma cacao) has always elicited a certain amount of scientific curiosity and mystical reverence from Europeans. Tucked away under the canopy within the planet’s narrow equatorial zone, the only environment in which it grows, and first cultivated in the lands that now constitute Guatemala and Belize, cacao had spent centuries well hidden from Continental eyes. However, after Hernán Cortés and his army took Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, for Spain in 1521, cacao was among the first marvels they wrote home about to describe the new world bounty they’d won for the Castilian crown. Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote down in his record of conquest that frothed chocolate was “the best thing they have to drink”.1 Others hailed it as the key to Moctezuma’s famed virility. Cacao, the base ingredient in chocolate, was also used as currency in Mesoamerica. It was not long before colonists took a keen interest in this fortifying drink and the money that grew on trees.
Unlike that of a typical fruit, the sweet white flesh of the lumpy autumnal-colored pods that sprout from the cacao tree, was considered by locals and European settlers alike to be “of little or no use” and as having a “phlegmatic” texture.2 Its seeds were the valuable prize. Local women followed ancient recipes to produce from these hard, dry seeds an unctuous frothy drink that by all accounts could cure almost anything. That cold cacao beans could become a warming energy drink flummoxed early-modern humoral science.3 Overall, the botanical source of chocolate proved biologically curious, even as the drink became irresistibly compelling. As early Spanish colonists learned, it was not for nothing that the cacao tree had an elevated status in the cosmology and agriculture of Mesoamerica. In the century following conquest, cacao, which had been sacred to the Aztec and to the Maya before them, ranked among crops like tobacco and sugar that proved addictive to the European consumer and crucial to the economic exploitation of the New World.
Spain imported beans regularly and Madrileño urbanites whipped up a vogue for the chocolate drink, whose popularity then spilled over into France, England, and beyond. Comparatively few Europeans had, however, seen the plant in its native ecosystem. Curious armchair explorers relied for their knowledge of chocolate’s raw ingredient on illustrations done by clerics and scientists who had voyaged across the Atlantic and documented the landscape. The history of such illustrations of cacao dates back to the first generation after conquest and it not only provides us with a bevy of wonderful botanical studies, but also chronicles cacao’s European reception from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the cacao tree made its textual debut in the form of glyphs in pre-Columbian, that is, indigenous codices. On the first page of what is now known as the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex, one of the oldest that survives today, the tree flanks the god Tezcatlipoca as one of the “trees of life” (a role the tree also played for the Maya, from whom the Aztecs learned cacao agriculture). Though highly stylized, in its placement of the fruit, the pre-Columbian Fejérváry-Mayer glyph offers a surprisingly accurate depiction of the plant’s growth habit. Cacao pods can push from anywhere along the tree trunk, as they do in the Codex, giving the tree a singular appearance. Post-conquest ethnographies and botanicals that feature the tree tended to instead Europeanize it by removing this distinguishing feature: they have the pods migrate up the trunk to the higher branches.
The first such “migration” of the pods occurred when Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún lent his name and publishing power to the inaugural ethnographic study of Aztec culture in the sixteenth century. Covering a period beginning in the years shortly after Cortés’s overthrow of Moctezuma II’s empire until its publication in Madrid in the 1570s, the Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain) documented social habits and rites of the Aztecs. Now known as the Florentine Codex (for the city of its owner library, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana), its composition among Mesoamerican codices is unique. This encyclopedic book in twelve volumes, each with dozens of short chapters, represents an early collaboration between Aztec and Spanish ethnographers. Sahagún harnessed knowledge of a team of indigenous students who had trained bilingually and biculturally at the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, where Sahagún taught. They wrote the book in glyphs and Nahuatl transcription in Latin characters, to which the friar, with the likely aid of the students, added Spanish translations. The glyphs provide insight into post-conquest culture using stylized pictograms, in the fashion of a pre-Columbian Aztec codex like the Fejérváry-Mayer or the Codex Borbonicus (which was written over with Spanish names after conquest). The more elaborate verbal descriptions that became a feature of post-Columbian Aztec and Spanish codices such as the Florentine Codex and the Codex Mendoza, document the Nahuatl language and translate it into Spanish, giving European readers insight into the symbolic and practical rituals of everyday Mesoamerican life.
Sahagún’s study was among the first to depict both the tree and the chocolate drink: cacao in nature and cacao in culture. Culture comes first in the order of the volumes. He classified social habits such as food and drink, along with their makers and sellers, among what he called the “virtues and vices” of the Aztec people (Book 10). Chocolate merits distinction among the beverages, being arduous to produce and crafted by women for the nobility, which he captures in the term atlaquetzal, or precious water.
In the years after conquest, “cacao made to drink”, as Sahagún calls the chocolate beverage, was a trade performed by the new Criolla class, women of Spanish descent born in the colonies. They are pictured in the glyph performing the first and final steps of the drink preparation: the Criolla “grinds . . . crushes, breaks, pulverizes” the seeds (left foreground) and “pours it back and forth, aerates it; she makes it form a head, makes it foam” (left background).4
Sahagún takes up the cacao tree in the next volume which focuses on the natural world of central Mexico. Despite the pods being large, because of its relatively compact size the cacaoaquavitl (quavitl = tree) falls into the category of trees that produce small fruit, like guava and plumbs.
The artist depicts the cacao tree in a shape — long trunk with a few outstretched branches — that echoes the cacao glyph of the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex. But the Florentine Codex does something specific to the tree that helps it conform better to European expectation: it moves the pods off the trunk and high up onto the branches. In fact, as the first page of Fejérváry-Mayer and the more recent figure that appeared in Walter Baker’s landmark history of the tree (pictured below) demonstrate, cacao pods can indeed push from anywhere along the trunk, giving the tree a singular appearance. Sahagún’s intention to translate Aztec culture for Spain caused him to strip the trunk of its pods so that the plant conformed better to the Continental vision of what a tree should look like.
When it came time for the Spanish crown to investigate the natural world of the tropical colonies it now governed, Philip II commissioned court physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo to undertake the first scientific expedition to New Spain. The posthumous publication of his descriptions of more than 3000 indigenous plants took the form of a encyclopedia richly illustrated with images by indigenous artists. This inaugural botanical of the new world was published posthumously in Spanish by the Mexican publisher Diego Lopez Davalos in 1615 under the title, Quatro libros de la Naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas y animales que están reunidos en el uso de Medicina en la Nueva España (Four Books on the Nature and Virtues of Plants and Animals for Medicinal Purposes in New Spain). In 1628, Nardo Antonio Recchi reorganized the original Latin text, eventually published in Rome as the Rerum medicarum novae hispaniae thesaurus (Thesaurus of Medical Things of New Spain).
The Rerum medicarum again figures the tree with no pods on its trunk, giving it a Europeanized look, though the largest pods do hang low. Visible too in this full-body portrait are the characteristic surface roots that snake horizontally from the tree along the ground. This text also explores the agriculture of cacao in more verbal detail than earlier texts. The Aztecs had four words for the plant species, depending upon how it was cultivated, which Hernández indicates in Nahuatl transcription and Latin (translated here): tree-cacao (cacahuaquahuitl) grew to full height, rope cacao — known by the same word — (cacahuaquahuitl) was cut periodically to middling height, flower cacao (xuchicacacahuaquahuitl) produced large blooms, and dwarf cacao (tlalcacahuaquahuitl) was stunted. Each type of cacao in the size hierarchy had a distinct application, from the large aromatic seeds used to make chocolate served to Emperor Moctezuma and other elites (the finest) to the small beans delivered as taxes (the least precious). Both Sahagún before him and Hernández depicted the largest and most precious cultivation, which could then be read back as the same strain depicted in Mayan pictogram and Aztec glyph: tree-cacao.
As the century elapsed, and botanical novelty turned to social curiosity, the plant’s image began to change accordingly. In the 1671 Usages du caffé, du thé et du chocolate (translated, The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, 1685), Philippe Dufour first explained chocolate alongside the two other steeped beverages served hot in Europe and also known for their curative effects: coffee and tea. In the frontispiece to the section on chocolate, a disembodied branch floats above the ground, upon which the seeds contained in the pod (lower left) and a vanilla bean, an indigenous ingredient commonly found in early Mesoamerican recipes for chocolate, lie in wait. Above them stands an “American” in Aztec dress and characteristic bow, with the utensils used for preparing and serving the drink at his feet.
A number of cultural allusions appear in this depiction of the plant. First, the pods on a cut branch (detail) look as one would expect to see them in a cabinet of curiosities, isolated as objects at which a European might marvel. Second, surrounding cacao with vanilla and servingware highlights its role as an ingredient in chocolate rather than a crop or a botanical specimen, and also as a consumer luxury rather than an indigenous woman’s trade. In the top image an “American” appears surrounded by the tools of the trade. Yet, the caption explaining the wares fails to make clear that these particular utensils — the chocolatière, or chocolate pot, for serving (right bottom of the top image) and the goblet for drinking (left bottom) — were designed and used, not by indigenous Americans, but by Europeans in the colonies and on the Continent. In its form, the goblet imitated the shape of a jícara, a gourd that was dried and used as a cup in Mesoamerica. The chocolate pot, for its part, was used as a receptacle to whip the chocolate with a molinillo (pictured next to it) that was inserted through a hole in the lid and twisted quickly between the palms of the hands. It represents a modern way of frothing that replaced the risky pouring method Aztec and Criolla tradeswomen traditionally used to create a foamy head on the chocolate. The deeply colonial artifacts surrounding the American denaturalize both the man and the plant, reducing them to European commodities.
As the sampling of wood-cuts above suggests, the images of the cacao tree before 1700 spoke to the needs of their audiences as well as the skill sets of their artists. Most of them stylized the tree without emphasizing its natural beauty or tropical environment. It would take a leader in entomology — Maria Sibylla Merian — to give cacao its native coloring and some indication of the sorts of wildlife that would surround it in the Americas. A landmark depiction of the plant’s lifeworld came to Europe when Merian published her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium in 1705. The book was the result of her 1699 expedition to Surinam, a Dutch plantation colony. Today historians of science consider it the West’s first major study of American entomology and hail its author as the most talented botanical artist of her century. Metamorphosis did something rare for the early environmental sciences: it combined empirical knowledge of local flora with Merian’s extensive knowledge of insect metamorphosis.
Merian, who had begun studying butterflies as a young woman in Holland, quickly ranked among Europe’s leading experts in the new science of entomology. Investigating the life cycle of Lepidoptera (the order of butterflies and moths), which involved an extraordinary metamorphosis, gave her expertise in insect transformation, an even rarer sort of knowledge. Fascination with insects that morph from simple into complex physiognomies drove her to undertake a voyage to the tropics, where moths and butterflies abound. The trip would make her the first woman of Western science to undertake a botanical expedition in the New World. She spent her sojourn in Surinam documenting the different stages of Lepidoptera’s existence, upon and around the leaves they eat. A talented artist, she privileged drawings over words in her presentation of these indigenous life forms: each vibrant page of the picture book illustrates the physical contours of the plant; the profile, markings, and habit of the pupa and emergent worms that can be found on it; and their transformation via chrysalis into full-color butterflies and moths. Merian’s images of the plant gave it the graphic power of fine art, as though cacao was a unique subject worthy of attention, and the botanical complexity of an ecosystem that sustains metamorphosis.
Merian depicts the cacao pod with variegation very close to the texture she gives the Surinam lemon, to which she compares the fruit in the verbal description of the image. While she telescopes to the branch of the tree, she shows the fruit hanging lower on the stem than the leaves, true to its growth habit. Both weight and size are easier to gauge in this image with a caterpillar feasting on the leaf — it is not so large or heavy enough to pull the leaf down — and small flower buds dangling from the stems. The fruit is much larger than the delicate stem and leaves would suggest was possible. Cacao pods are indeed substantial at about eight inches in full length and weighing in at about a pound, something earlier depictions do not render as plainly. Further, Merian’s interest in the four stages of insect metamorphosis appears to have influenced her depiction of the fruit. Four variations of the pod show new fruit pushing out, growing around its lumpy seeds, at full maturity, and then with its interior layers exposed. The mass of fleshy pulp cradles dozens of seeds — normally around forty. We are reminded that unlike the meat of other fruits, which are their treasure, the flesh of this one merely incubates the plant’s true dietary riches: its beans.
If insects made the cacao plant ecologically concrete, the cacao plant also earned its very own signature insect after Merian depicted their relationship. The exquisite image of cacao composed for the 1705 edition (plate 26) features a black and red striped armyworm and its less spectacular moth. Now known as the Southern Armyworm, Spodoptera eridania belongs to the family Noctuidae, night fliers, of the order Lepidoptera. It’s east Asian relative, Tiracola plagiata, goes by the name Cacao Armyworm now that its diet includes that fruit, which traveled around the equator from South America to Asia in the wake of global colonialism. Merian’s seventeenth-century armyworm appears on Surinam cacao in the four states of its existence, reminding the European reader that they are not the only creature who enjoys chocolate as part of a healthy diet. Picturing the vibrant cacao plant as food for a caterpillar and a haven for its metamorphosis folds the plant into Surinam’s natural world. It was the closest a European armchair traveler could come to experiencing chocolate in nature.
Merian’s drawings inaugurated a high age of naturalism in botanical sketching at the dawn of the high age of botanical expedition, of which perhaps the most famous of the century was undertaken by Hans Sloane to Jamaica. Sloane succeeded Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society and bequeathed his substantial collection of artifacts and specimens to the crown, creating the foundation of what became today’s British Museum. The magisterial two-volume account of his 1690s trip to the Caribbean islands, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (Vol. 1 1707, Vol. 2 1725) contains nearly 350 plates published over the first quarter of the eighteenth century. His voyage in and around Jamaica lasted fifteen months and resulted in the “discovery” and collection of many hundreds of plant species, with cacao figured among them in the second volume. According to the title page, illustrations showcase “the figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved.” While there had been images of cacao in circulation before 1725, the tree in Sloane’s study, drawn by Dutch artist Everhardus Kickius, can justifiably claim to render the small physical details of the plant, veins and petioles, more visible than previous illustrations.
The image features a branch as we might expect to see it in a botanist’s inventory destined for a laboratory to be tested or in a materia medica display. (London’s Natural History Museum still displays Sloane’s original cacao specimen.) The artist’s eye has dissected the plant like a scientist to cluster three buds and detail a sample of flesh and a seed from the pod’s interior. Although the sketch is black and white, physical markings on the leaves and fruits showcase the plant’s characteristic striations: the ridges on the pods that compartmentalize the seeds and the dense veins of the leaf surface where it takes in light under the canopy. Another feature of the plant’s ability to draw enough nutrients and energy to form one-pound fruits is visible in the hollow of the cut stem. The sketch finally puts the visual depiction into dialogue with an earlier authority, John Ray, whose Historia planetarum Sloane carried to guide his investigation of Jamaica’s landscape. The words “Ray.hist. 1670” printed at the bottom of the image, send the reader to the first page of Ray’s chapter on cacao.
While the cacao illustration is one among a great many in his study, Sloane developed a special relationship to it, one that brings him nearly as much notoriety today as does his founding of the British Museum. As the story goes, like most travelers to the colonies, Sloane partook of the chocolate drink in Jamaica, but had an aversion to what he perceived to be its bitter taste. Legend has it that he added dairy to the brew to cut its bite, creating the first chocolate milk. The Sloane anecdote helped inaugurate a tradition of Europeans claiming to improve the bitter Mesoamerican drink by adapting it to their supposedly more refined taste. Scholars now consider these tales part and parcel of the general colonial pretension to civilizing the Tropics (see Delbourgo and Norton in the bibliography). In point of fact, the Aztecs sweetened their chocolate with honey and smoothed it with corn meal, in addition to adding a host of medically beneficial spices, many of which were enjoyed by Spanish and English colonists for generations. Those importing cacao for preparation in Europe logically sought alternatives to ingredients hard to find on the Continent, such as corn, and turned to what they had. As early as the 1660s, a treatise by Henry Stubbe and a witty dialogue by Bollicosgo Armuthaz recommended adding milk or egg, as a binding agent and for taste. While Sloane did not, therefore, invent the idea of adding a dairy product like milk to chocolate, his name did help the recipe garner press. Shrewd confectioners already began using Sloane’s notoriety to brand chocolate milk in the eighteenth century, and circa 1850, Cadbury printed “Sloane’s” recipe on its chocolate milk label, formalizing the connection. Like the historical illustrations of the tree, stories about chocolate tend to say as much about the interests of their teller as they do about the details of their subject.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 7, 2017

author: Christine Jones


text:
“Alas, Poor YORICK!”
The Death and Life of Laurence Sterne
By Ian Campbell Ross
March 7, 2018

On the 250th anniversary of Laurence Sterne’s death, Ian Campbell Ross looks at the engagement with mortality so important to the novelist’s groundbreaking work.

This year brings two notable anniversaries in the life of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Two hundred fifty years ago, on February 27, 1768, he published A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. By Mr. Yorick. Fewer than three weeks later, on March 18, aged just fifty-four, he died.
Few writers have passed their entire literary career so knowingly in the shadow of death as had Sterne. In the work of still fewer, least of all eighteenth-century comic novelists, does death appear so prominently or so pervasively. In the first of Tristram Shandy’s nine volumes, published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767, Parson Yorick, a fictionalised self-portrait of the author, dies. Three words are inscribed upon the plain marble slab that marks his grave, serving — as passers-by observe it — as both epitaph and elegy: “Alas, poor YORICK!” In Sterne’s novel, these all-too-familiar words face a wholly unfamiliar black leaf: a gesture towards the impenetrability of death that anticipates the many ingenuities that mark out Tristram Shandy as one of the most typographically original of all novels.
Tristram Shandy is a comic fiction but there was little humorous about Sterne’s own relationship to death. As a boy, he experienced the death of four of his young siblings before he was himself eight. Having left Ireland for school in Yorkshire at the age of nine, he never again saw his much-loved soldier father, who died when Sterne was seventeen. Within a couple of years, when he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Sterne experienced the first symptoms of the consumption — pulmonary tuberculosis — that would haunt him for the remainder of his life. Much later, when travelling abroad for his health, he vividly recalled the very moment: “I had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full”.1 Small wonder, perhaps, that Sterne’s comic masterpiece is punctuated by the deaths of the fiction’s most loved characters. By the end of Volume IX, not only Yorick but Tristram’s brother Bobby, his mother Elizabeth, and even that favourite of Victorian readers, uncle Toby, have all died, along with the courageous soldier, Le Fever, the account of whose death, excerpted from the novel’s sixth volume, was for long regarded as one of Sterne’s most sublimely touching achievements.
Despite constant bodily frailty, Sterne fought long and hard against his mortal illness, continuing all the while to develop the fiction that brought him European-wide fame. Volume VII of Tristram Shandy opens with the hero’s memorable flight from death:
NO——I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided the vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil, would but give me leave . . .
NOW as for my spirits, little have I to lay to their charge . . . in no one moment of my existence . . . have ye once deserted me . . . and when DEATH himself knocked at my door——ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission——
“——There must certainly be some mistaken in this matter,” quoth he.2
Sterne’s first stay abroad for the sake of his health, made possible by the financial success of Tristram Shandy, took him to France, where he stayed from January 1762 to May 1764. After a lengthy visit to Paris, where he enjoyed once more the social and literary acclaim that he had known in London, he headed south, spending time in Montpellier, and in Toulouse, where he passed the winter of 1763–4. It was this stay that provided Sterne with the material he fictionalised in Tristram’s account of his own flight from death, determined to gallop
without looking once behind me to the banks of the Garonne; and if I hear him clattering at my heels——I’ll scamper away to mount Vesuvius——from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world’s end, where, if he follows me, I pray God he may break his neck——.3

The attempt to outrun death led to an improvement in his health that scarcely outlasted his return home.  Very soon, he reported that he was “bleeding to death at York, of a small vessel in my lungs——the duce take these bellows of mine”.4
Sterne’s second attempt to prolong his life by avoiding the rigours of an English winter took him to France from the autumn of 1765 to the early summer of the following year. It was this visit that furnished further experience of continental travel that he would make the basis of Yorick’s narrative in A Sentimental Journey.
The fact of the author’s death so soon after that work was published gives the very title of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy an added poignancy. As far as the reader is concerned, Yorick — one of the two characters of his own creation, along with Tristram Shandy, that Sterne chose to impersonate in the years of his fame — gets no farther than a “little decent kind of an inn by the road side” on the French side of the Alps, ready to make an ascent he will never commence.5
Sterne himself did better, travelling to Italy in the winter of 1765–6. There he stayed first in Turin, capital of the Duchy of Savoy, and later at Milan, then under the control of Habsburg Austria. It was in the Lombard city that Yorick encountered the Marquesina di F***: a connection which, he noted in one of the sexually ambiguous phrases that characterise A Sentimental Journey, “gave me more pleasure than any one I had the honour to make in Italy”.6 From Milan, Sterne travelled by way of  Parma and Piacenza to Florence. It was in the Tuscan capital that the English painter Thomas Patch portrayed the consumptive Sterne as Tristram Shandy bowing to Death, who has just knocked on his door. From Florence, Sterne travelled to Rome and, finally, to Naples, arriving in time for the pre-Lenten festivities: “We have a jolly carnival of it——nothing but operas——punchinellos——festinos and masquerades.”7
Delighted as always to hobnob with the aristocracy after decades of living in rural obscurity in his Yorkshire parishes, Sterne seems to have thought the highlight of his stay in the Bourbon capital a visit to one of the celebrated masquerades given by the Eleonara Borghese, Principessa Francavilla, wife to Ferdinand IV’s Grand Chamberlain, one of the great offices of state in the Kingdom of Naples. “[H]ere I am, happy as a king after all, growing fat, sleek, and well liking——not improving in stature, but in breadth”.8 Even in such surroundings, death was not far away. One of his companions, Sir James Macdonald, also travelling for his health, was so ill that he was forced to stay on in Naples after Sterne left, and would die at Frascati, outside of Rome, in July 1766. Sterne himself spent Easter Week in the papal city, where the Anglican cleric passed “as merry a Spring as our hearts could wish”, adding “haec est Vita dissolutorum”.9
Fewer than twelve months after returning to England, Sterne knew that his flight from death offered only a short reprieve. His letters, especially those, known as the Journal to Eliza, written to Elizabeth Draper, the young married woman with whom he had become infatuated, tell of the remorseless progress of his disease:
I have been within the gates of death.——I was ill the last time I wrote to you; and apprehensive of what would be the consequence.——My fears were but too well founded; for in ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick’s gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India handkerchiefs with it.——It came, I think, from my heart!10
Sterne survived, still busy working on A Sentimental Journey, for ten months longer. When it was published, subscribers received along with their copies a printed apology that the work consisted only of two volumes and not the promised four. Sterne explained that he had been prevented from completing the work by “ill health” and expressed his optimistic though unfulfilled intention to deliver the missing volumes “early the next Winter”.
It was in the seventh volume of his Life and Opinions that Tristram Shandy wrote:
Were I in a condition to stipulate with death . . . I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and therefore . . . wish that it happen not to me in my own house——but rather in some decent inn——at home I know it,——the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will not so crucify my soul, that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of: but in an inn, the few cold offices I wanted, would be purchased with a few guineas, and paid me with an undisturbed, but punctual attention——.11
Laurence Sterne died in just such circumstances: in lodgings in Old Bond Street, with no friends present but properly attended by a nurse. Fortuitously, there was a witness to his death. John Macdonald, footman to one of Sterne’s friends, arrived to ask after the author at the request of his employer and his dinner guests. “I went up into the room”, wrote Macdonald, “and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said: ‘Now it is come.’ He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.”12
In the unexpectedly short final volume of Tristram Shandy, published little more than a year before he died, Sterne had reflected seriously on death, addressing his “dear, dear Jenny”, a fictional embodiment of the many women with whom he enjoyed sentimental and, perhaps, carnal relationships:
Time wastes too fast, and every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more——every thing presses on——whilst thou are twisting that lock,——see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.——
——Heaven have mercy on us both!13
True to the facetious tendencies that enliven his writing, the following chapter of Tristram’s life and opinions is a memorably short one:
CHAPTER IX
NOW,  for what the world thinks of that ejaculation——I would not give a groat.14
Shortly before his death, Sterne had written to his cousin, the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, declaring defiantly, in an allusion to a passage in the fifth volume of Tristram Shandy: “I brave evils.——et quand Je serai mort, on mettra mon nom dans le liste de ces Heros, qui sont Morts en plaisantant [and when I am dead, my name will be placed in the list of those heroes who died in a jest]”.15
In the event, death had the laugh on him. Sterne’s funeral took place on March 22 in the fashionable church of St George’s, Hanover Square. His body was buried in the church’s new graveyard, beyond Tyburn, only to be stolen by body snatchers and taken to Sterne’s old university, Cambridge, where it was dissected by the professor of anatomy, Charles Collignon. One of those attending the dissection recognised Sterne, and his body was subsequently returned to London for clandestine reburial. Yet the author of Tristram Shandy did not lie undisturbed for eternity.
When the St George’s burial ground was scheduled for redevelopment in 1969, his great champion, Kenneth Monkman, succeeded in locating Sterne’s bones and had them reinterred next to St Michael’s Church, Coxwold. This was the village that Sterne had made his home after the local magnate, the Earl of Fauconberg, bestowed on him the living, along with those he previously held not far away at Sutton-on-the-Forest and Stillington. After two decades of making the best of things in precarious financial circumstances, Sterne was grateful enough for this handsome testimony to the extraordinary success the first instalment of Tristram Shandy brought him. Nevertheless, throughout the remainder of his life, Sterne left his new dwelling as often as possible, to revel in the celebrity he enjoyed in London for, as he asserted, “I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous”.16 Today, his remains lie across the road from his parsonage house in an otherwise obscure Yorkshire village far distant from the English metropolis. Sterne would have recognised and, perhaps, enjoyed the irony.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Ian Campbell Ross


text:
Flash Mob
Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will
By Kevin Duong
November 9, 2017

Kevin Duong explores how leading French revolutionaries, in need of an image to represent the all important “will of the people”, turned to the thunderbolt — a natural symbol of power and illumination that also signalled the scientific ideals so key to their project.

It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement.
Nowhere was this as clear as in their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them. But “the people” enjoy no such obvious body and no evident means of self-expression. What does the will of the people actually look like? And how do we hear their voice if they don’t have a mouth with which to speak? As French revolutionaries enthroned the will of the people, they stepped into uncharted terrain. Democratic revolution, it turned out, required men capable of visualizing the invisible and making appear what escaped our immediate senses. Indeed, it seemed to require the labor of scientific inquiry applied to the people themselves. Like the invisible composition of air, the secret patterns of a magnetic field, or the stratifications of the earth’s soil, democratic politics was governed by a hidden law that the scientist-statesman had to uncover.
Revolutionary scientists designed a variety of strategies to make the will of the people discernable. They ranged from the statistical to the legalistic. However, one particular approach stood out, both for its intrinsic peculiarity and for its frequency: attempts to analogize the will of the people to lightning strikes. The historian Mary Ashburn Miller has documented the long history of symbolizing sovereignty as lightning.1 In the absolutist imagination, lightning symbolized royal power and its Jupiterian pretensions. The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan features a thunderbolt alongside a crown, cannon, and other items in absolutism’s symbolic ensemble.
With the Revolution, French intellectuals seized this lightning and redirected it against their king. In 1792, as the Revolution radicalized into a democratic revolution, members of the National Convention found themselves debating what to do with Louis XVI. On December 3, 1792, Robespierre answered that the king should be summarily executed rather than tried for treason, because “a people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts.”2 Louis XVI was struck down by the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution on January 21, 1793.
The trope was ubiquitous, not only in texts and speeches, but also in the visual culture of the Revolution. An allegorical print from 1792 features “Liberty”, the figurehead and personification of the people. She is depicted striking down the remnants of monarchy with a fist full of lightning. Behind her, powerful bands of light (and enlightenment) repel the dark clouds that allude to the obscurity of monarchical superstition.
A similar visual vocabulary is employed in a painting from the same year allegorizing August 10, 1792, the date of the popular insurrection that brought down the French monarchy. Although the painting’s provenance is unknown, its symbolism is clear enough. Lightning erupts from “the mountain”, the nickname for the Jacobins who were seen as the people’s true faction. The lightning disperses the dark clouds with a flash.
In both illustrations, the causal relationship between popular insurrection and enlightenment, democratic revolution and scientific progress, is placed at center stage. The lightning, once unleashed, is conducted towards frogs and snakes. These critters represented “the Swamp”, the derogatory nickname for the Convention’s moderate Girondin faction known to be skeptics of popular direct action. A 1793 illustration repeats the visual pattern: a Jacobin uses his hand as a conductor for lightning from the heavens — the sacred people? — and directs it to the frogs and snakes at the base of the mountain.
These illustrations intimate what many revolutionaries might have thought about the will of the people. It was a natural force, erupting spontaneously like lightning. Yet it was capable of being conducted towards the true enemies of the people. It was invisible until unleashed, but once it struck, it was luminescent, dramatic, and absolute. The motif was pervasive enough for the revolution’s critics to invoke it satirically. In an extraordinary broadside from 1797, Jacobins are portrayed as zombies leading the living to their death. The broadside is crowned with an illustration of the All-Seeing Eye casting down destructive thunderbolts onto the Bastille. The headline warns us: “The mirror of the past in order to safeguard the future. BE IN AWE, PEOPLE!” Passed from the hands of kings to the people and their champions, lightning was now used to convey the counterrevolutionary interpretation of democracy: it was, as Joseph de Maistre argued, a satanic orgy of destruction.
It was no accident that lightning was chosen as a model for the will of the people. The language of science and the language of politics were melding together in the crucible of democratic revolution, and not only in France. A fascination with electricity connected scientists of all stripes across the Atlantic, and tugging on those threads reveals a web of radicalism in late eighteenth-century scientific culture. Take two of the leading Jacobins: Marat and Robespierre. Marat was one of the heroes (or demons) of the Revolution. But before 1789, he was a scientist: in 1782, he had published a prominent study of electricity entitled Recherches physiques sur l’électricité. The next year in 1783, in the village of St Omer, a Monsieur de Vissery equipped his home with a lightning rod. Villagers believed the rod actively summoned lightning to their homes, and so they petitioned for the rod’s removal. The case eventually reached the Conseil d’Artois, where a young Robespierre took up the case to defend Vissery in the name of scientific progress. Robespierre won the case, and it made his reputation as a progressive lawyer. In his enthusiasm, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin. In the letter dated 1 October 1783, he thanked the American for the “sublime discovery” of lightning conduction.2
Franklin was well known for having tamed lightning by conducting it from the sky in his “kite experiment” of 1752. Revolutionaries like Robespierre were more than a little obsessed with this fact. In his person, Franklin seemed to offer a paragon of scientific statesmanship. After all, besides taming lightning, Franklin served as ambassador to France from 1776-85. Yet he was not the only scientist of electricity to enthrall the French. On August 26, 1792, the National Convention set aside time from their busy schedule of waging revolution to confer honorary citizenship to the English scientist Joseph Priestley. (In June, they had conferred the same honor to Priestley’s son, William, in virtue of being his father’s representative.) Priestley was a friend of Franklin and known for discovering oxygen and founding Unitarianism. But Priestley was also a scientist of lightning. Throughout the 1770s, he authored and edited several editions of the History of Electricity, which was eventually translated into other languages. In 1774, he delivered a paper on lightning storms to the Royal Academy and exchanged letters with Jeremy Bentham concerning atmospheric lightning. In 1775, he wrote to the American scientist Andrew Oliver about the origins of electricity. And in 1778, he sat on an English Board of Ordinance tasked with optimizing the shape of lightning conductors.3
French revolutionaries idolized Priestley and Franklin because they sincerely believed that science was intimately connected with the struggle for freedom. For these men, the cause of science was the cause of democracy. The sentiment traveled both ways. When Priestley was not investigating electricity and air, he preoccupied himself with championing the French Revolution in England. His combination of revolutionary fervor and scientific fame made him a target for Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Evidently, Priestley’s neighbors agreed that he was a threat to social order. In 1791, they burned down his Birmingham home and laboratory, forcing Priestley to flee to America in 1794 where he was welcomed by yet another revolutionary scientist and French Revolution enthusiast: Thomas Jefferson (himself an occasional diplomat to France).
These men shared an enthusiasm for democracy and electricity which, oddly enough, informed one another. Yet it shouldn’t be surprising. When faced with new political questions about democracy, these men applied themselves as they were wont to do, namely as scientists. The outcome was a transatlantic circuit of research, discovery, evidence — and radical politics.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 9, 2017

author: Kevin Duong