text:
Troubled Waters
Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine
By Katherine Harvey
April 19, 2023

From cabbage green to course meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions.

In the mid-thirteenth century, William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan friar, travelled to the Mongol Empire. The main purpose of his visit was to undertake missionary work, but he also wrote a colourful account of his travels for King Louis IX of France, in which he described the region and its inhabitants. Among his many curious observations, he was astonished to find that the local physicians, who were generally skilled and knowledgeable, did not examine their patients’ urine.1
To the modern reader, this seems an odd detail to highlight, but William came from a world in which uroscopy — the examination of urine for the purpose of diagnosis and prognosis — was one of a doctor’s most valued skills. The link was so strong that the urine flask became the identifying symbol of the late medieval physician, who was often shown examining a sample. The symbol was used both to celebrate illustrious figures such as St Cosmas (the patron saint of medicine), and to punish charlatans like Roger Clerk of Wandsworth, who in 1382 was found guilty of selling useless “cures” to the poor, despite having no medical knowledge or training. He was led to the pillory on a saddleless horse, “a urinal being hung before him, and another urinal on his back”, in mockery of his malpractice. Satirists jeered at practitioners for their obsession with such unsavoury matter (Petrarch memorably claimed that the papal physicians were pale and emaciated because they “rummage around in sloshing chamber pots”), and comic images of monkey-physicians examining urine flasks are found in both manuscript marginalia and in early fourteenth-century stained glass at York Minster.2
Medieval physicians were interested in their patients’ urine because it provided immediate insight into the humoral state of the body. Before William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, physicians believed that the principal purpose of digestion was to convert food into blood, which was constantly being used up, and thus had to be replenished every night while the patient slept. Digestion was a complex, multi-stage process, and it led to various waste products like urine, which bore traces of the organs involved in its production (including the stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys). Consequently, if the body was too hot or too cold, or if its humours were out of balance, this would be apparent from the urine it produced.3
Uroscopy is a very old practice, dating back at least as far as the ancient Babylonians, and was widely discussed by the classical authorities whose writings formed the basis of much medieval medical practice. The Hippocratic Aphorisms include advice on urine-based diagnosis and prognosis. For example: “Colourless urine is bad; it is especially common in those with disease on the brain” and “The presence of particles like coarse meal in the urine of patients with fever signifies a long illness”.4 Over the centuries, a substantial literature on the subject accumulated, and the Articella — a collection of treatises that formed the basis of university medical education in the later middle ages — included Isaac Judaeus’ Liber Urinarum (written in the ninth century) and De urinis by Giles of Corbeil (ca. 1140–1220). Since uroscopy lent itself to diagrammatic representation, practising physicians often used illustrated guides: such texts survive in sufficient numbers to suggest that they were widely-employed working tools in later medieval Europe.
A particularly fine example is found in Bodleian Library MS Savile 39, which includes a late fourteenth-century ring diagram complete with twenty labelled flasks, their colours ranging from white to black. The flasks are grouped according to meaning: four reddish-gold samples, for example, signify good digestion, whilst three flasks of very dark liquid suggest death. Some authors are quite imaginative in their description of the colours: in a late fifteenth-century miscellany, one sample is described as being “green like cabbage”. Another widely circulated treatise described a “type of black urine that is caused by mortification, and that type of blackness is most like a polished black horn, or like a raven’s feather, or like a man from Ethiopia”.5 Such comparisons to familiar sights were probably intended to help practitioners distinguish between very similar colours, and to compensate for the shortcomings of the diagrams, the decoration of which sometimes owed more to the availability of pigments than to scientific accuracy.
Many treatises suggested that it was possible to identify several layers in the urine, which meant that some diagrams show samples with very distinctive (and surely exaggerated) colour differences: red with a mint-green layer on top, or olive green with an orange-ish ring. If the top layer was particularly large, it might signify head pain; if it was very foamy, that indicated “gassiness boiling into the urinary vessels or distension or some other disorder of the lung”. The middle region should be examined for cloudiness, which could be a good or a bad sign depending on the condition from which the patient was suffering. It was at the bottom of the sample that one was most likely to see sediments, although these might also be suspended in the urine.6 Some texts place particular emphasis on things found in urine: in this pair of flasks, from an early fifteenth-century medical miscellany, we can see blood in one sample, and particles suspended in the other. The captions explain the meaning of these worrying features: blood in the urine indicates a broken vein at the back of the head, and gravel “betokeneth ache and spite of the stone in the reynes” — that is, kidney stones.
To interpret all these signs correctly, the skilled physician would not simply match the sample to the colour swatch; rather, he would combine his observations with his own extensive knowledge (both theoretical and practical) in order to identify what ailed his patient and determine the likely progression of his or her disease. Surprisingly often, this was done remotely: such was the trust in this method that many patients simply sent a sample to the doctor, who examined it and sent his verdict back. In 1334, the Aragonese towns of Vic and Montcada agreed to share a municipal physician, even though they are some sixty kilometres apart. The man appointed, Romon Ardey, was to live in Vic, but to interpret urines brought to him from either town.7 Far from being a strategy restricted to those who could not afford to see a doctor, this form of consultation was used even by the wealthiest members of society, such as Agnes, Lady Stonor, who in 1480 “sente here water unto M. Derworthe to undirstonde his conceite, ande howe he demyth by her water whedir she be in wey of mending”. His verdict is not recorded, but she died the following year.8
Not everyone thought this was a good idea: Isaac Judaeus, author of one of the most authoritative uroscopy treatises, criticised “fools who would base prophecies on it, without seeing the patient, and determine what disease is present, and whether the patient will die, and other foolishness”.9 Anyone who did consult in this way should obtain as much contextual information as possible, to avoid falling into the same trap as the eminent Parisian physician Guillaume Boucher (d. 1410). He examined a sample, and confidently announced that it belonged to a man with stomach problems. The couriers burst out laughing, because it was produced by a woman.10 Partly motivated by a desire to avoid such humiliation, university-educated physicians increasingly argued that bedside medicine was the best form of treatment: it allowed the practitioner to conduct a physical examination (considering other important signs, such as pulse, and scrutinising other excreta, such as sweat and faeces) and to interrogate the patient about his symptoms.11
Bedside medicine also allowed the physician to assert authority by showing off his knowledge and skills — something which most were very keen to do, in order to prove their superiority over their many rivals on the medical marketplace. Examining a urine sample in the presence of the patient who produced it, plus his family, friends, or servants, could be a particularly effective way to do this, as the process was straightforward but impressive. Ideally, the sample was collected in the morning, after the patient had slept and before he drank anything, and then allowed to settle for several hours; during this time, it must not be exposed to direct sunlight or excessive heat, which might change its composition.12 The physician’s inspection typically took place towards the end of his visit, and he often made a performance of it, holding the flask up to the light, and scrutinising it at length. One twelfth-century manual suggested that “While you look at the urine for a long time you pay attention to its colour, substance and quantity and to its contents from the diversity of which you will diagnose the different kinds of diseases . . . whereupon you promise health to the patient who is hanging on your lips.”13
A skilled physician could identify a whole range of conditions based on a urine sample. According to Giles of Corbeil’s influential treatise, pure and unclotted blood in the urine indicated a problem with the kidneys, especially if it was accompanied by pain; “lividity coupled with minute, distinct particles consistently indicates respiratory trouble”, and gout was revealed by “tiny white flecks”.14 Urine was a particularly useful tool for diagnosing leprosy, because the immediate physiological cause was thought to be a malfunctioning liver — an organ which was central to the digestive process, and thus any problems would be visible in the urine. In 1456, when Richard Walsham, a monk of Norwich Cathedral Priory, was suspected of contracting leprosy, the Prior had several physicians examine his body and urine in order to confirm that he was not afflicted.15
Medieval people also believed that uroscopy could reveal when an individual would die, allowing him to use his final days wisely. After William the Conqueror fell from his horse in 1087, he suffered agonising internal injuries. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury (ca. 1090–1143), his physicians “inspected his urine and foretold certain death”, which allowed him to receive the last rites and to put his affairs in order.16 In 1214, suspecting that he was fatally ill, Abbot John of St Albans examined his own urine for “the small, hidden marks which he knew to be signs of death”, and correctly predicted that he had only three days to live. The Abbey’s chronicler admiringly noted that being “very experienced in the art of medicine, [John] had often made similar infallible predictions . . . about others.”17
Urine predicted the end of life, but it could also be used to track its conception through fertility testing. The Trotula, an influential compendium of women’s medicine, recommended that both husband and wife should urinate in a pot of bran: if, after ten days, either pot was stinking and full of worms, that indicated which spouse was infertile.18 According to The Dome of Uryne (a widely circulated Middle English compendium of uroscopic texts), it was possible to know whether a woman had conceived immediately after intercourse: if her urine was clear, then she was pregnant, and if it was thick, she was not. A few months on, the sex of the child could be determined by the cloudiness of the mother’s urine, whilst lead-coloured urine suggested a miscarriage.19 But not all physicians were willing to pronounce on such matters. A wise one would refuse to do so if he suspected that a female patient was intending to procure an abortion.20
Urine could be used to uncover an individual’s sexual history. The water of a “constant virgin” would be “wan and extremely calm”, and passed in a slow, delicate fashion because the passages of the womb and vulva were narrow. (It was evidently common to conflate the urinary passage and vagina.) On the other hand, “Thick urine of a woman declares her to be corrupt”. Men’s urine could be equally revealing, as seed in the bottom of the flask proved that the provider recently had sex.21 In the mid-twelfth century, shortly after taking his third wife, Ralph, Count of Vermandois, became seriously ill, and his doctor told him to abstain from marital relations. But when the physician examined the count’s urine, he realised that his advice had been ignored, and correctly predicted that Ralph would be dead within three days.22
Count Ralph’s unfortunate demise highlighted another potential problem with uroscopy: patients who ignored or mistrusted their doctors. Some went so far as to test the skills of their chosen practitioner. Although Arabic medical authorities such as Rhazes and Avicenna — both of whom were widely read and highly respected in the medieval West — recommended it, European physicians rarely smelt or tasted urine for medical reasons.23 Even so, they might be well-advised to give it a discreet sniff, since cynical patients sometimes provided samples of white wine or other yellowish liquids.24 In one extreme case from around the year 1000, the duke of Bavaria began his consultation with the famous monk-physician Notker by sending him a urine sample provided not by the duke, but by a pregnant servant girl. On examining it, Notker fell to his knees, praising God and declaring: “Within the week, the Lord will perform an unheard-of miracle: the duke will give birth to a son!” Shortly afterwards, the maid produced a baby boy, and the duke sent his messengers back to Notker with a sample of his own.25
In theory, patients could also fall victim to urine-related trickery, as happens in a humorous tale from The Decameron in which Calandrino’s friends team up with a doctor to convince him he is pregnant.26 But for the most part, the demand and trust in uroscopy was high, because it seemed to offer objective and certain diagnosis for a relatively small cost. In 1315, when Jaume II of Aragon closed a street in Barcelona’s Jewish quarter, he exempted the physician Vidal Rouen, because “many people have to show him the urines of sick people and to ask him for advice for them”.27 Other towns in the region appointed municipal physicians for this purpose: Abraham des Castlar, employed in this capacity by Castelló d’Empúries in 1316, agreed to “look at and assess all the urines brought to me by the citizens”.28
Indeed, the demand for uroscopy was too high to be satisfied by university-trained physicians (who were both rare and expensive), and many patients turned to less qualified practitioners. In mid-fifteenth century Essex, John Crophill worked as both a bailiff and a healer. Seemingly self-taught, and certainly not university educated, his commonplace book includes two texts on urine (alongside others on subjects such as blood-letting and astrology), plus a list of patients whose urine he had examined, and to whom he had provided cures.29 Across the Channel, Jacoba Felice, an unlicensed female practitioner who appeared before the Parisian medical authorities in 1322, offered similar services. Several of her mostly female clientele recalled her “continually examining their urine in the manner of physicians and doctors”, and reported that she had cured them when male physicians had failed to do so.30 Eighteen years earlier, when Gueraula de Codines faced a similar hearing in Barcelona, she asserted that “she could diagnosis a patient’s illness from his urine”, having been taught to do so by “a certain foreign doctor”. Clearly her legal travails did not deter patients, since three years later, she was back in court, claiming that many people consulted her, and that her uroscopy skills were especially in demand.31
Whilst professional trust in uroscopy waned considerably after ca. 1500, partly because of its growing association with such quacks, patient enthusiasm for this cheap, convenient, and reliable practice remained high.32 Indeed, although uroscopy no longer serves as an all-purpose diagnostic tool, new forms of urine analysis have developed from these ancient traditions, and our present-day medical landscape is awash with urine samples. Although twenty-first century patients benefit from relatively recent innovations such as hormone-based pregnancy tests, colour is still used to diagnose conditions including porphyria, whilst bloody and/or cloudy urine continues to be recognised as a sign of kidney stones and infections. Although medieval understandings of urine were deeply flawed, the popularity and longevity of urine-based diagnosis reflect an enduring desire on the part of both patients and physicians for reliable tests which provided objective diagnoses, and serve as an important reminder that, contrary to popular stereotypes of pre-modern medicine, much of it was rational, methodical, and rooted in science.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Katherine Harve


text:
Jumbo’s Ghost
Elephants and Machines in Motion
By Ross Bullen
July 20, 2022

On September 15, 1885, twenty-five years after his capture in Sudan, Jumbo the elephant tragically died when struck by a freight train. Ross Bullen takes us on a spectral journey through other collisions between elephant and machine — in adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, and psychic science — revealing latent anxieties at the century’s turn.

In his 1886 book The Ivory King, the American naturalist Charles Fredrick Holder describes the status of elephants through a conservationist lens. While acknowledging that the elephant is “the true king of the beasts, the largest and most powerful of existing land animals, and to young and old a never ceasing source of wonder and interest”, it is nevertheless “doomed”. Citing prehistoric hunters and the contemporary ivory trade as major factors in the elephant’s decline, Holder also mentions the “rapid advance of the British in the East, the introduction of railroads and improvements which mark the progress of civilization in India, where heretofore the elephant has been employed, cannot fail to have a fatal effect, and their extermination is only a matter of time.”1 Although Holder sympathizes with elephants, he still lauds the technology that will displace them as an “improvement”: a mark of the “progress of civilization”. The elephant may be the “king of the beasts”, but it can offer no competition to the steam locomotive and other Western technologies.
While comparisons between elephants and machines are a common feature of twenty-first century consumer culture — elephant-adjacent terms like “mammoth” and, of course, “Jumbo”, are regularly used when marketing motors and countless other commodities — the idea truly gained traction in the nineteenth century. The invention of steam locomotion coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the parts of the world (Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia) that elephants call home. From a Western perspective, elephants were powerful and impressive animals that performed much of the work that machines did in Europe and North America. At the same time, it was clear to colonial observers that modern technology was not only superior to the physical labour of elephants, but it would also eventually displace them, perhaps even to the point of extinction. In his 1854 Hard Times, Charles Dickens famously describes the resemblance between “the piston of [a] steam engine work[ing] monotonously up and down” and “the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”, an image he returns to four more times in a relatively short novel.2 The elephant functions as something like a technology of the colonial Other, and thus is subject to fantasies of Western dominance and displacement. At the same time, the blend of “melancholy” and “madness” that was so often used to portray captive elephants also speaks to cultural anxieties about the powerful, unpredictable, and disruptive industrial machinery of the Victorian era.3
The symbolic clash Holder discussed between railroads and elephants has often resulted in literal collisions — and the best-known collision remains the death of Jumbo in 1885.4 Holder devotes a whole chapter to Jumbo, recounting the story of his capture and purchase in Africa, his many years at the London Zoological Gardens, his sale to P. T. Barnum, the outrage this purchase caused among the British public, and the scene of Jumbo’s death in St. Thomas, Ontario. After a final performance of Barnum’s circus, Jumbo was being led to his boxcar, when an unscheduled freight train bore down on him. Attempting to stop, it nevertheless struck Jumbo, whose body — weighing more than six thousand kgs — derailed the engine and two cars. The elephant died some fifteen minutes later. In the 1889 edition of his autobiography, Barnum described the death of Jumbo as a “universally announced and regretted tragedy”, and claimed to have received “hundreds of telegrams and letters of sympathy”.5
Jumbo’s death produced a curious catalogue of material (and perhaps immaterial) remainders. To commemorate the tragedy’s centenary in 1985, the city of St. Thomas installed a life-size statue of the elephant, crafted out of concrete and reinforced steel by the self-taught Canadian artist Winston Bronnum (who made a career creating giant animal sculptures as roadside attractions). And after Jumbo’s death, his hide was stuffed and continued to tour with Barnum, eventually retiring to the showman’s eponymous natural history museum at Tufts University, where the elephant became a school mascot. The taxidermied Jumbo was destroyed by a fire in 1975. All that remains of his great hide is the tail — accidentally severed and stored in the university archives — and a small pile of ashes, kept in a Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar, which still resides in the office of Tufts’ athletic director.
The material objects of Jumbo’s afterlife exist at extremes: heavy statues, a handful of ashes. This tension between the corporeal and incorporeal was noted at the time of Jumbo’s death as well. While Barnum was displaying his skeleton, trying to cash in on the elephant’s corpse, at least one writer imagined that death had somehow freed Jumbo from his bulky materiality. A jokey aside published in the September 26, 1885 issue of Chicago’s The Current speculated that, “It may possibly be said that Jumbo’s ghost will not have so much trouble in getting around the world as Jumbo had.”6 Indeed, in the decades after his demise, the elephant’s spirit seemed to haunt a variety of media. In what follows, I would like to accompany Jumbo’s ghost on a spectral journey through a series of collisions — in children’s adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, bizarre electrical experiments, psychic science, and beyond — between elephants and technology in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Our first stop is India, a decade after the Rebellion of 1857. A group of European explorers in Calcutta are planning a voyage across Northern India. Among their group is an engineer, Banks, who has invented a new way of travelling through the country: a giant steam-powered elephant — known as the “Steam House” or “Behemoth” — that will pull two carriages (one for the adventurers, one for their servants) across any terrain, including water. Although The Steam House (1880) is one of Jules Verne’s lesser-known fictions, his novel offers a heady variation on the elephant-as-machine metaphor. Not only does the steam engine replace the elephant’s role in India, it replaces the elephant itself, as the iron “Behemoth” towers over and outshines its animal competition. Maucler, the novel’s narrator, relates the impression it first made on the local people:
First, and apparently drawing the caravan, came a gigantic elephant. The monstrous animal, twenty feet in height, and thirty in length, advanced deliberately, steadily, and with a certain mystery of movement which struck the gazer with a thrill of awe… His huge feet were raised and set down with mechanical regularity, and he changed pace from a walk to a trot, without either the voice or the hand of a mahout being apparent.      The spectators were at first so astonished by all this, that they kept at a respectful distance; but when they ventured nearer, their surprise gave place to admiration.      They could hear a roar, very similar to the cry uttered by these giants of the Indian forest. Moreover, at intervals there issued from the trunk a jet of vapour.      And yet, it was an elephant!7
The Steam House seems to pass as a real elephant with the people of Calcutta, despite its massive size (twice as large as a typical Indian elephant), “mechanical” movements, and the suspicious jet of steam issuing from the elephant’s unusually stationary trunk. Although Maucler claims that “all his members were endowed with movement”, he also concedes that the Steam House is quite obviously a machine, “a marvelous deception… encased in steel”, which any observer who dared to approach it would quickly discover.8 By straddling the line between Western technology and Eastern animal life, the Steam House seems to have an uncanny effect on its Indian viewers, who both do and do not recognize it as a familiar and useful elephant. The scene revolves around the well-worn trope of the credulous native struck with awe by Western technology. In fact, Verne’s entire novel is fueled by this colonial fantasy, as the troupe of Europeans and their mechanical elephant frequently battle and establish dominance over the Indian landscape, wild animals (including real elephants), local potentates, and eventually “Nana Sahib”, a.k.a. Nana Saheb Peshwa II, the rebel leader at the siege of Cawnpore, who — in Verne’s imagination — has been living in hiding for the past decade.
Published a little over twenty years later, Frances Trego Montgomery’s children’s novel The Wonderful Electric Elephant (1903), and its sequel, On a Lark to the Planets (1904), imagines an elephant machine similar to the Steam House, but — keeping pace with new technology — it is powered by electricity. This upgrade also corresponds to an increase in the elephant’s range, as the children in Montgomery’s stories travel first around the world, and then the solar system, in their wonderful electric beast. Although Montgomery’s books are more fantastical than Verne’s novel, they rely on the same trope of technology dominating and deceiving awestruck non-Westerners. The Wonderful Electric Elephant concludes with Montgomery’s two child protagonists, Harold and Ione, painting their elephant in order to trick the Siamese (Thai) into believing it is an auspiciously-coloured elephant, or chang pheuak. “They both took a white-wash brush and began to work for dear life, and in a couple of hours had finished”, Montgomery writes. “There before them stood their beautiful elephant, transformed from a plain, ordinary, mouse-coloured elephant into a beautiful, rose pink one.”9 The children then allow their elephant to be captured by the “head hunter of the prince of Siam” and brought to the prince’s palace, where it is bathed, fed, and lavished with gifts and jewels by “two rows of boys, black as ebony, with silver trays on their head”.10 This scene serves a double purpose: it is both a send-up of the (supposedly) lavish treatment that Siamese monarchs extended to auspicious elephants, and it presents the familiar spectacle of racialized natives worshipping Western technology.11
Montgomery’s creation was not the only electric elephant to make its debut in 1903. Edison Studios’ notorious film Electrocuting an Elephant came out in January of that year. The seventy-four-second film depicts the execution of Topsy on Coney Island. Named after a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy was an elephant captured in Southeast Asia and sold to Adam Forepaugh’s circus. Eventually sold on to Sea Lion Park, these new owners deemed her impossible to handle or trade, and so they scheduled her to be hanged as a public spectacle. After objections from the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), this gruesome plan was modified to involve cyanide-laced carrots, strangulation, and 6,600 volts of electricity delivered via copper-lined sandals.
Electrocuting an Elephant depicts Topsy being led by a handler to the site of her execution. After a cut, the camera frames the elephant in the centre of the screen, kicking once to try to remove a sandal. Topsy stands still until she suddenly stiffens, as flames rise from her feet. A few seconds later, stiff and smoking, she collapses forward. This happens around the forty-five second mark. The remainder of the film — nearly forty percent of its total running time — is a sustained shot of Topsy’s uncannily still body, as the smoke slowly blows away. Toward the end of the film, an otherwise seamless cut introduces a human figure into the shot: a man standing behind Topsy observing her, like a spectral presence inserted into this scene of death. The figure then walks out of the frame, and the film ends.
While Montgomery uses electricity to bring a mechanical animal to life, Electrocuting an Elephant uses it to bring death and stasis to a real elephant. And yet, the collision between Topsy and 6,600 volts did produce a kind of mechanical motion: a seventy-foot reel that would play in a coin-operated kinetoscope, an early device for showing short films to paying customers. Like a train on its track, the perforated film strip of Electrocuting an Elephant would roll through the mechanical pathways of the machine, at first reanimating Topsy and then replaying her death for anyone who could spare some change.
The site on which Topsy was electrocuted — which would become Luna Park amusement park, from 1903 until 1944 — was already an elephant graveyard. The same location had housed the “Elephantine Colossus”, a seven story, thirty-one room building that functioned as a tourist attraction, hotel, concert hall, and — reputedly — a brothel. The structure was designed by James V. Lafferty and constructed in 1885, a scaled-up version of Lafferty’s “Lucy the Elephant”, which was built near Atlantic City in 1881 (and is still standing today). Destroyed by fire, the Elephantine Colossus weirdly anticipates the fate of Jumbo’s hide at Tufts University nearly 80 years later. There is no record of anyone saving the Colossus’ ashes in a peanut butter jar, but like Jumbo’s ghost, the elephantine spirit of the scorched hotel made contact with at least one receptive witness.
A story titled “A Remarkable Vision”, published in the “Department of Psychic Experiences” section of the April 1897 edition of The Metaphysical Magazine, recounts the unusual experiences of one “Mr. M.”, vacationing on Long Island in September 1896. After spending the evening with some neighbours discussing “telepathy and psychic phenomena in general”, he and his wife were walking home along the beach when they “were amazed to see the western sky brilliantly illuminated by what was undoubtedly a very large and disastrous fire.”12 At home, Mr. M. decides to take one final look at the conflagration from his balcony, at which point he witnesses the following remarkable vision:
At that moment I chanced to glance upward in the sky at about an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and a small white cloud attracted my attention. Its outline seemed peculiar, and its shading in white and pink was also unusual. Suddenly this cloud assumed the perfect outline of an elephant. The phenomenon seemed so strange that I called the attention of the other men to it. Without any further hint on my part, they declared it to resemble the figure of an elephant most strikingly. The fire soon died out, and with it — in fact long before it — the image. No further thought was then given to the matter.13
The next morning, Mr. M. reads the following headline in the New York Herald: “The Elephant at Coney Island Burned”. This news obviously casts last night’s elephant vision in a new light, and Mr. M. reaches out to the editor of The Metaphysical Magazine. Just below this account, the magazine’s editor offers his own hypothesis:
The minds of many people near the burning edifice were in a state of intense excitement and possessed with the one idea, uttered or unuttered: “The Elephant! The Elephant is on fire!” Noticing the reddened sky, Mr. M. mentally reached out to them and received their thought. Cloud-forms are hazy at best, and attain distinctness only from the mind of the observer. The elephant-cloud was doubtless shaped by the thought transferred to the mind of Mr. M.14
Like Jumbo’s ghost, this immovable building attained a new mobility in death, becoming a kind of psychic telegram that travelled from the minds of those who witnessed its destruction to the receptive consciousness of Mr. M. On the same spot, a few years later, Topsy the elephant would meet a similar fate, her death transferred to celluloid film by the Edison Studios’ crew.
Charles Frederick Holder, author of The Ivory King, would not be surprised to learn that in the early twenty-first century, the world’s elephant population has greatly diminished since the 1800s. It is perhaps understandable that, as these remarkable animals are driven toward extinction, humans have found new ways to memorialize them: statues, buildings, locomotive machines, photographs, films. One irony of many of these memorials, though, is that while they commemorate the death of elephants, they also celebrate the technology that displaced or destroyed them. On June 20, 2022 — some two-hundred km north-east of St. Thomas — the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled its first-ever public art commission, a large sculpture of an elephant standing on a circus ball by the contemporary Canadian artist Brian Jungen. According to Jungen, the statue was inspired in part by the story of Jumbo. Constructed of discarded leather sofas and cast in bronze, the sculpture is titled Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill (the sculpture’s Dane-zaa subtitle translates as “My heart is ripping”). Couch Monster invites spectators to consider the contrast between its subject matter — an elephant, animated, alive, and, perched as it is on a circus ball, seemingly on the verge of movement — and its form: discarded sofas, associated with rest and stillness, cast in solid bronze. A great virtue of Jungen’s Couch Monster is that it openly acknowledges the way that humans have treated elephants like disposal commodities, as indicated by the statue’s unique construction materials, and by its subtitle. “Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill”, the statue — or perhaps Jumbo’s ghost — says to us. “My heart is ripping.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Ross Bullen

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Liquid Bewitchment
Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850
By James Brown
September 13, 2023

The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and others, James Brown enters the architecture of intoxication — dram shops, gin halls, barbershops — exploring the spaces that catered to pleasure or evil, depending who you asked.

In 1751, the engraver and satirist William Hogarth created Gin Lane, his celebrated visual retrospective about the devastating effects of this newfangled spirit on the lives of London’s poor. The print, a companion piece to Beer Street, offers a harrowing panorama of poverty, addiction, insanity, violence, infanticide, and suicide; the only people and institutions who thrive amongst the mayhem and despair are an undertaker, “Gripe” the pawnbroker, and the two purveyors of the “deadly draught”: a cellar gin shop and “Kilman” the distiller. In the words of Hogarth’s most recent biographer, Gin Lane’s “racked scene of dissolution . . . imprints itself indelibly on the mind”.1 Derivatives are beloved of political cartoonists, and so frequent and dependable is its appearance at academic conferences on alcohol history that a “gin lane klaxon” is scurrilously sounded on social media. However grotesquely transfixing the image, its dominance within both the history of alcohol and art has occluded a wider and subtler range of representations of gin and the environments in which it was consumed, which flourished across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2
The Cursed Bewitching Liquor
Gin was one of a wide range of new intoxicants — including chocolate, coffee, opium, sugar, tea, and tobacco — that, in what has been called a “psychoactive revolution”, radically expanded the mind-altering possibilities for European people between 1600 and 1800.3 Spirits (mainly aqua vitae, a rough distillation of wine) had been manufactured in English monasteries, private homes, and apothecary’s shops since the late medieval period, although they were prohibitively expensive and generally consumed medicinally and in small quantities. Brandy, rum, whisky, and especially gin exploded the spirituous marketplace from the later decades of the seventeenth century, with various factors — including grain surpluses, restrictions on French imports, a relaxation of the monopoly on distilling, and increased duties on ale and beer — making gin’s rise particularly meteoric. Originally imported from the Netherlands as genever, by the 1690s gin was produced on an industrial scale by domestic malt distillers, who sold their wholesale product to a network of smaller compound producers. These producers then “rectified” it with a variety of botanical additives, including juniper berries, coriander seeds, orange peel, angelica root, liquorice powder, and turpentine. By 1725, according to the Cumbria distiller George Smith, gin had “gain’d such universal applause, especially with the common people . . . there is more of it in quantity sold daily in a great many distillers shops, than of beer and ale vended in most publick houses”.4
The resulting beverage was orders of magnitude stronger than the traditional alcohols that had hitherto dominated recreation and diets (ales, beers, ciders, and wines), and represented a step change in England’s cultures of intoxication; Jessica Warner has gone so far as to term it “the first modern drug”.5 Put simply, gin hit early modern drinkers differently, offering “not a gradual descent into inebriation” (in James Nicholls’s phrase) but instantaneous and extreme drunkenness.6 From this potency stemmed a range of unusual and frightening side-effects, widely rehearsed by eighteenth-century commentators, including immorality, criminality, madness, compulsive intoxication, and death. As one anonymous 1736 author observed, “by taking a small quantity people were almost in an instant rendered so much intoxicated as to lose the use of their reason, and all command over themselves”, and were “induced to commit the most wicked or extravagant enormities”.7 Likewise, in her 1750 treatise aimed at female gin drinkers, Eliza Haywood warned that whereas conventional beverages made their consumers “sullen, sleepy, or extravagantly gay”, gin made them “bold, obstinate, and filled with an extravagant desire of doing mischief . . . we may say that dram-drinking is the most expeditious way to deprive mankind of their reason . . . by substituting a temporary, and in time a constant frenzy in its stead”.8 The following year, another anonymous writer agreed that “[i]ts baneful influence reaches their [consumers’] very souls; every virtuous principle is eradicated and destroyed”. Moreover, “once they have habituated themselves to drinking drams, they are never satisfied but while the glass is at their noses”.9 A recurring contemporary metaphor for gin’s peculiar physical and psychological effects was bewitchment, the subjugation of normal human will and faculties to an insidious supernatural force.
Seminaries of Mischief: Gin Shops
Like other novel intoxicants, gin created an entirely new species of urban space organised around its sale and consumption . As cocoa spawned the chocolate house, coffee the coffeehouse, opium the opium den, and tea the tearoom and tea garden, so gin brought into being the gin or dram shop.10 Described variously by contemporaries as “receptacles for wretches”, “seminaries of mischief”, or “the nurseries of all . . . vice and wickedness”, these unfamiliar environments were mainly a metropolitan phenomenon, and proliferated from the early decades of the eighteenth century. A committee of Middlesex justices convened in 1726 estimated there to be six thousand gin shops in that outlying London county alone, a ratio of up to one in five houses in some parishes.11 As the below mezzotint intimates, gin shops were far more rudimentary than the traditional inns, taverns, and alehouses that had hitherto made up England’s victualling hierarchy, and which, by the Hanoverian period, had become increasingly sophisticated and regulated under licensing laws. All that was needed to begin trading was a supply of the “pestiferous draught” (either distilled on the premises or acquired from a boutique manufacturer). Chairs and tables in these shops were kept deliberately sparse to encourage off-sales as well as “perpendicular drinking”, both guaranteeing rapid churn of a predominantly poor clientele who lacked the funds for lengthy on-site drinking sessions.12
One spatial innovation of the gin shop was the counter or bar, an appropriation from the burgeoning retail sector. Despite conventional wisdom, these were not a feature of established drinking places, in which alcohol was ferried directly from cellars or storage rooms to customers in halls, parlours, and chambers via a battalion of hosts, drawers, pot boys, and tapsters. As the architectural historian Mark Girouard has noted, the counter was a revolutionary “time-and-motion breakthrough” that made for much more rapid and efficient service; it conferred the additional advantages of separating servers from customers, providing a surface for measuring and pouring drinks, and forming a barrier behind which drink, serving vessels, and takings could be securely stored.13
Fluid Trajectories
As well as being vended and enjoyed within these specialised settings, gin was a promiscuous and ubiquitous substance that insinuated itself into a variety of preexisting sites and spaces. As suggested by the barmaid missing the pour in the mezzotint above, gin proved impossible to contain.14 The “maddening drench” was incorporated into the repertoires of traditional innholders, taverners, and alehouse-keepers, especially in the provinces, and — mainly because retailers who traded primarily in commodities other than alcohol could sell gin without licence or scrutiny — was sold extensively in coffeehouses, chandleries, groceries, cookshops, pawnbroker’s premises, and tobacconists. Because takeaways and off-sales comprised an important part of the business of dram shops, gin was widely consumed in homes and private residences — such as by the sex worker and sailor in the mezzotint and etching below — and it could even be enjoyed with a haircut or shave. Etchings of gin served in barbershops (like this one) offer a visual counterpoint to the deceased barber in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, who has been driven to the end of a noose by bankruptcy brought on by a lack of business from his bedraggled and gin-addled clientele.
Like tea and saloop (a hot Ottoman drink made from powdered orchid roots), the “infernal combustible” also found itself outside in the open air; indeed, Gin Lane is a nightmarish vision of alfresco consumption. As well as being sold in dedicated shops, gin was retailed from sheds, stalls, and lean-tos in “holes and by-alleys”, was enjoyed on thoroughfares, and — like other comestibles throughout the period — was hawked on the street by mobile vendors, especially during mass entertainments such as executions.15 The best-known depiction of this practice is Hogarth’s The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn, which features a street retailer slinging gin from a wagon at a public hanging, although a lesser-known glimpse is provided by James Gillray’s 1795 etching Copenhagen House, which shows a hawker plying gin at a crowded and raucous meeting of the London Corresponding Society. Like coffee, gin was also sold from temporary or “pop-up” venues in parks and during fairs. Frost fairs were a regular occurrence whenever the Thames froze over, and during the 1814 freeze, gin was being sold from marquees called the “Orange Boven” and the “City of Moscow”, the latter topped with a life-size effigy of the Duke of Wellington.
A raft of increasingly effective central government legislation between 1729 and 1751 led to a steady decline in gin drinking and its associated sites and spaces over the later decades of the eighteenth century, although the “diabolical liquor” received a second wind in the early nineteenth century, when reductions in duties engendered a resurgence of consumption and another innovative breed of space: the gin palace. Appearing from the 1820s, and experiencing their heyday the following decade (when the term was coined), these sumptuous locales were characterised by a number of architectural novelties that were again borrowed from the retail sector: the ever-present counter, but now also large glass frontages punctuated by columns or pilasters, rococo detailing and enrichments, gas lighting internally and externally, outsized vats containing gins of various stripes, and extensive textual inscription. The latter underscored long-standing associations between intoxicating spaces and textuality (drinking houses and coffeehouses were key settings for the circulation and consumption of books, newspapers, and other printed materials), and, as we will see below, the extensiveness of labels and legends in gin palaces proved something of a gift for caricaturists. Charles Dickens described a typical gin palace in 1836:
All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior. A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and there are two side-aisles of great casks, painted green and gold, enclosed within a light brass rail, and bearing such inscriptions, as ‘Old Tom, 549’; ‘Young Tom, 360’; ‘Samson, 1421’ – the figures agreeing, we presume, with ‘gallons’, understood. Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon, full of the same enticing vessels, with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished.16
At the same time as gin was regaining momentum within these deluxe new venues, an organised temperance movement was starting to take shape. Spearheaded by coffee retailers, doctors, evangelicals, and industrialists, and animated by a fervent belief in the deleterious economic, medical, moral, and social effects of alcohol in general and spirits in particular, temperance societies campaigned vigorously against recreational drinking and ultimately for total abstention. This reforming imagination was fundamentally spatial; if, as Brian Harrison notes, their “vision of recreation [was] centred on the home” (and on the sobering intoxicant of tea), then the newfangled gin palace served as both symptom of and metonym for the corroding evils of alcohol.17 And as well as mobilising pamphlets, maps, and songs, temperance reformers also made their case through the medium of images.18
George Cruikshank the Teetotaler
At the vanguard of this visual and spatial temperance strategy was the graphic satirist George Cruikshank. London born and bred, and (like his near-contemporaries James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson) an inheritor of the visual tradition of Hogarth, Cruikshank was a prolific and successful commercial cartoonist who produced more than six thousand commissions for books, magazines, and pamphlets over the course of his long career. Gin and its palaces featured heavily in the vigorous and immersive scenes of London life in which he specialised. Earlier designs, such as the ones he created for Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (from which the above description is drawn) and Pierce Egan’s picaresque 1821 bestseller Life in London, are broadly benign and affectionate; the premises are attractive, and the customers for the most part convivial, healthy, and respectable. This probably reflects the central and positive role that drinking and gin palaces played in Cruikshank’s own life during this period. While he seems not to have suffered from addictive or pathological drinking, like most nineteenth-century creatives he was a habitual and excessive consumer of alcohol well-known for his love of company-keeping and public sociability.
Cruikshank had a dramatic change of science in 1847 when, at the age of fifty-five, he enthusiastically embraced teetotalism. His decision might have been in response to the negative health consequences that he was starting to experience, and was probably also informed by the fate of his father, the illustrator Isaac Cruikshank, a full-blown dipsomaniac who reputedly died of alcohol poisoning at forty-six after winning a drinking competition.19 Whatever his motivations, from the moment of his conversion Cruikshank developed what Richard Vogler has termed “an evangelical preoccupation with the evils of alcohol”, supporting and supplying illustrations for the National Temperance Society, and developing particular disdain for gin and gin palaces, which are reconfigured in his later work.20 In his best-known series The Bottle (1847), which charts domestic and familial disintegration over eight glyphograph plates, “creaming gin” (that “strong cordial”) infiltrates and causes chaos and heartbreak within the home, while the opening plate of his more ambitious, spatially expansive, and compelling follow-up series The Drunkard’s Children (1848) is set within a gin palace. The adult daughter of the alcoholic is framed at the centre of “that fountain which nourishes every species of crime”; she is approached by a shawled procuress, and surrounded by a ragtag clientele that includes imbibing children and babies and an inebriated disabled man. All are dwarfed by giant barrels bearing the ironic legends “Cream of the Valley” and the “Celebrated Double Gin”. Other portrayals from this era depict hopeless and helpless drunkards spilling and stumbling from gin palace frontages.
Challenging received notions of a linear intellectual and artistic trajectory from valorisation to demonisation, Cruikshank’s most striking negative depiction of a gin palace, entitled The Gin Shop, dates from 1829, nearly twenty years before his renunciation of alcohol. Here, prefiguring his later anxieties, he imagines the gin palace as a macabre and treacherous space of death, albeit within a comic rather than social realist idiom. The etching depicts another doomed family huddled in the jaws of a literal gin-trap, encircled by morbid motifs. The gin barrels are styled as coffins, they are served by a skeleton disguised as a barkeep, and they menaced by a second skeleton holding an hourglass and spear. Like gin palaces themselves, Cruikshank characteristically deploys captions, speech bubbles, signs, and other textual devices to drive home his message. The gins are named “Kill Devil”, “Blue Ruin”, and “Deady’s Cordial”, signs point to and portend the “workhouse”, “madhouse”, “gaol”, and “gibbet”, and the skeleton grimly predicts “they have nearly had their last glass”. In a revealing double entendre, underscoring the association between gin’s pernicious effects and the malign supernatural, the “spirit vaults” contain imps dancing around a cauldron chanting an incantation.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 13, 2023

author: James Brown


text:
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams

By Demetra Vogiatzaki
September 28, 2022

With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost love and a fever dream of antiquity.

Poliphilo’s eyelids finally close as the sun rises. His memory is tormented by Polia, whom he first glimpsed through a window in Treviso. Her chastity is non-negotiable: in a time of plague, she has sought spiritual purity. Yet Polia’s resistance only makes her suitor more desperate. On May Day, 1467, exhausted and heartbroken, Poliphilo finally gives in to a dream — the only space of requite. With its conjured worlds and strange architectural landscapes, few visions in Western literature have been scrutinized more than the vision Poliphilo had on that morning.
We know about this dream thanks to a manuscript that landed in the hands of Leonardo Crasso, a jurist of Verona who saw it fit to make the story public. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili — or, as the book came to be known in English, “Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream” — was eventually published by the renowned Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1499. It was the first fully illustrated book produced by Aldus, a printer whose reputation stemmed from his vast humanist erudition and devotion to classical literature. Structured as a “dream within a dream”, the narrative weaves together mythological, biblical, and occult references to construct a universe filled with ruinous landscapes and orgiastic celebrations. No cost was spared by Crasso; Poliphilo’s dream is visualized across 234 folio-sized pages, which feature nearly two hundred woodcut illustrations of unparalleled mastery for their era. In Redmond Burke’s words, the editio princeps was “the most beautiful incunabulum ever printed”.1 Yet Hypnerotomachia did not fit comfortably on Aldus’ august shelves. Its licentious content quickly turned into a matter of controversy, stirring speculation on the conditions and purpose of the incunabulum’s production.
For all that we know, the original “dreamer” remains unidentified. Written in an idiosyncratic hybrid language fusing Italian, Latin, and Greek, and replete with inauthentic Egyptian hieroglyphs and an abundance of architectural and botanical jargon, the rambling text of Hypnerotomachia does little to dispel the mystery of its authorship, even though it does mirror with remarkable accuracy the composite, winding nature of its contents. An acrostic formed by the first letter of each chapter, reading “Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit" (Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia) led scholars to identify a Dominican monk from Treviso as the author of the book.2 Nevertheless, the polymathy of Poliphilo — along with the cryptic and playful nature of the work as a whole — has raised doubts regarding the plausibility of this hypothesis, with some critics suggesting that “Colonna” could be a pseudonym.3
Hypnerotomachia has been described as a “tableau of rich inventions”, “a romantic version of an encyclopedia”, and a “treasure house of aesthetic descriptions”.4 The name “Poliphilo” translates both as “lover of Polia” and as “lover of many”. And it is indeed an erotic curiosity that spills over from his pursuit of Polia, sublimated into an almost amatory infatuation with many forms of architecture. The dream follows Poliphilo’s meandering footsteps as he wrestles with mythical creatures and his own impulses in a series of fantastical worlds. His eyes alight on imagined monuments, statues, and follies. Myriad species of plants, growing silently in these chasmous structures, dissolve into blossoming orchards and forests populated by dragons, nymphs, and carnivorous wolves. From magic lamps to ornate corals, everything is meticulously recounted by Poliphilo, as his insatiable curiosity becomes the primary force that propels him into action, fixing together the disjointed scenes of his journey.
Designed to draw its reader into the seductive delirium of Poliphilo’s odyssey, Hypnerotomachia is perhaps the first secular iteration of an immersive virtual world to be granted a comprehensive and consistent architectural presentation. Throughout the book, the figurative rhetoric of chivalric love is brought into a playful union with the visual conventions of fifteenth-century architectural treatises. Important here is not only the attention given by the author to the architectural staging of a literary dream, but the way in which the dream, in turn, seems to infiltrate and overtake the design of this outlandish scenery.
The bewildering shapes of the various structures encountered by Poliphilo along his journey — colossal statues, pyramidal temples, and elaborate fountains, among other edifices — depart radically from the principles of composition found in canonical historiography, calling to mind a number of mythical antiquities that haunted the dreams of architects at the time. For the historian Liane Lefaivre, this association between composite architecture and the recombinant imagination is best illustrated by the Temple of the Sun, a jumble of unrelated parts that are stacked to create a monument of unthinkable dimensions.5
Considered vertically, the building is an unlikely compilation of elements. On top of the temple is a plinth, and on top of the plinth is a pyramid, and on top of the pyramid is a monolithic stone cube and on top of the monolithic stone cube is an obelisk and on top of the obelisk is a bronze statue of a nymph holding an inverted cornucopia. Poised on one leg with the other elevated in arabesque, she pirouettes on a pivot with every shift of the wind, emitting a deafening shriek with every turn.6
Hypnerotomachia abounds with similar piles ranging in size from massive to miniscule. See, for example, how the principle of the obsessive piling in the “Temple of the Sun” is repeated in the idiosyncratic formulation of the “admirable Coral Bush” and the “Perpetual Fountain”; two among the countless “miraculous” objects encountered and assiduously described by Poliphilo in his narrative. Organic and inorganic elements are here arranged vertically without any discrimination in terms of their materials, shape, or strength, producing ornamental ensembles of obscure aspiration. It is interesting to note, however, that in the Aldine edition of Hypnerotomachia, woodcuts flatten the voluminous splendor of these objects into linear compositions. The result conveys a paradoxical feeling of surface and depth that not only matches the symbolic nature of dreaming, but also the various undecipherable inscriptions and pseudo-hieroglyphs that the protagonist discovers along his journey.
The origins and meaning of these runes have been traced in the contours of ancient and modern dream theories, from Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica all the way to the Freudian Dream-work, where repressed drives are organized by the unconscious into condensed, encrypted representations able to evade the censorship of waking reason. Extending this premise, critics see the monuments encountered by Poliphilo as the agonizing embodiments of his elusive beloved — or, architectural ideal.7 Yet it is perilous to assume a direct affinity between form and cognition.8 In the case of Hypnerotomachia, this would reduce architecture and dreams to their faint, distorted replicas: the dream, in the words of Michel Foucault, to “a mere rhapsody of images”, and architecture to a decontextualized play of forms.9
Hypneromachia’s illustrations of architectural and ornamental objects appeared during the period when printing presses were replacing the handcraft aesthetic of illuminated manuscripts. An unprecedented exactitude of images, achieved by innovations in printing techniques during the second half of the fifteenth century, brought forth a new visual culture in which knowledge could be recorded and transmitted in a format that remained identical from copy to copy.10 Through the skillful orchestration of type, text, and image, Poliphilo’s dreamworld expands and contracts continuously, pulsating between the fragile solidity of architectural stereography and the planar mechanics of the printing press.
Although in most cases the woodcut technology’s abstraction is able to delineate the features of these admirable structures, in other cases, such as that of the Temple of Venus Physizoa, the descriptive texture in Poliphilo’s ekphrastic frenzy far exceeds the representational refinement of wooden block reliefs:
The huge dome displayed the greatest evidence of workmanship more nearly divine than human; but if it were human, it aroused astonishment that human ingenuity should make such an ambitious attempt in the founder's craft: for I judged that its great vastness had been made in a single solid fusion and casting of metal. I was astonished and overwhelmed by what I deemed to be impossible. Be that as it may, this bronze work consisted wholly of a vine sprouting from beautiful vases of the same material that were ranged perpendicularly above the columns. Thence they spread out branches, sprouts or shoots, and tendrils of dizzying intricacy, perfectly fitting the convex curve of the dome and all of the appropriate thickness. There were leaves, bunches of grapes, infants climbing and plucking them, flying birds, lizards and snakes, all modelled exactly from nature; and in between it was all transparent.
Poliphilo’s description unfolds through a marvelous enhancement of his perceptual abilities. As his (inner and outer) vision sharpens, the interior of the temple dissolves into an infinite array of details, organized in continuously magnified pictorial scenes. Despite its virtuosity — and impressive awareness of contemporary artistic conventions — the orthogonal section of the Temple of Venus fails to convey the edifice’s complexity. A complexity that seems to transcend not only the limits of representation, but also those of human comprehension.
In the centuries that followed its enigmatic appearance, Hypnerotomachia came to represent a type of architectural and artistic invention that derives its sensuous, eccentric qualities from the cryptic world of dreams, rather than from the orderly forms usually associated with Renaissance aesthetics. Yet, besides its multiple references to and deviations from architectural rules, the world in which Hypnerotomachia unfolds presents astounding continuities with the broader religious, civic, and cultural context of Venice at the time. The ruination of the world in which Poliphilo wanders coexists with the marvelous monuments he encounters in a way that is reminiscent of the double function of Christian icons in this period.11 For Hans Belting, the icon’s intentional fragmentation of pictorial space pointed to a transcendental world that remained intact. Accordingly, the kind of memory that these artworks heralded had “both a retrospective and, curious as it sounds, a prospective character”.12 The icon was not only a trace of something from the past but also something that was promised in the future. A similar dynamic is at play in Hypnerotomachia, against the backdrop of the Venetian art scene and the work of Vittore Carpaccio in particular.
Investigating the various strategies mobilized by fifteenth-century Venetian artists to represent the past, Patricia Fortini Brown observes the imaginative re-creation of a sensuous Arcadian antiquity in works like Hypnerotomachia.13 This was not merely an echo of the paradisiacal travel reports from the Aegean islands to which Venice had privileged maritime access. It also reflected a peculiar quality shared by architectural and religious drawings at the time, namely the simultaneous invocation of multiple temporalities.
In Carpaccio’s Dead Christ (ca. 1520), for example, a landscape reminiscent of Hypnerotomachia unfolds around the body of the slain savior. Almost Byzantine in its execution, the scenery is rocky and desolate, with opened graves, skulls, broken tombstones, columns and slabs: fragments of what would have been seen as pagan ruins. In the background of the image, however, appear two figures in Quattrocento attire and pastoral attitude, happily playing musical instruments. Like Poliphilo and Polia, these figures function as “time travelers”, contemporizing antiquity for the beholder, while intruding into a past that will be forever unattainable.14 In the pages of the Renaissance architectural treatise, the “downward movement of imitation”, bringing the present back into the past, and the “upward motion of invention”, in which the past serves as a model for the future, are also merged in a similar “chiasm”, argues Anne-Marie Sankovitch.15 The latter creates uncanny structures built on the logic of dreams — like images drawn from one's memories to project a yet-to-be-realized reality.
Under the guise of the dream, Hypnerotomachia seems to present a new symbolic universe in which the complicated relationship between ancient and modern space could be redefined. In his influential book, Unearthing the Past, Leonard Barkan showed how the pace at which antiquities were being unearthed in the late Quattrocento brought forth a sea change in historical, political, and aesthetic thought.16 These resurfaced objects didn’t just challenge established views on the past. They also generated new kinds of artistic expression and appreciation, including the production and circulation of drawings and ekphrastic narratives, the first private collections of antique fragments, and new forms of theory and practice that embraced architecture’s inventive as well as restorative potential.
Yet Hypnerotomachia is much more than an architectural manifesto. These intricate negotiations also seem to emerge through the orchestration of Poliphilo’s and Polia’s triste. Almost halfway through his dream, Poliphilo encounters the beloved and embarks with her on a journey to celebrate their union. The dreamworld appears to have diminished Polia’s resistance; receptive to Poliphilo’s advances, the woman sets off to explain her former hesitations and recent change of mind.
By honoring the vow she took during the plague that ravaged her hometown, Polia dutifully safeguarded her emotional and bodily boundaries against a courtship that she saw as a risk to her life. “No sooner did I see him before me”, she describes of a meeting with Poliphilo, “than I felt polluted [contaminata]”.17 Hiding alternatingly in the shrine of Diana’s temple and in the privacy of her bedchamber, Polia almost succeeds in avoiding her suitor’s pursuit. It is only after experiencing a revelatory vision of her own that she begins to doubt her resistance. She dreams about a graphic, supernatural violation of body and soul — a Cupid-like winged boy playing the dismembering executioner — representing the societal violence that awaits should she continue to reject the company of a male companion. Rarely acknowledged by scholarship, the author’s decision to give Polia a voice and dream of her own remains one of the most daring propositions of the book.
Much like Nausicaa’s visitation by the goddess Athena in the opening of the Odyssey’s sixth rhapsody, Polia’s vision at the closing of Hypnerotomachia reaffirms the primacy of a patriarchal, civic order over the sovereignty of a female body. Unlike Nausicaa, however, who was chastised for the messiness hidden behind the ornate doors of her bedroom, Polia is forced to give up idealistic purity and embrace the disturbing disorder of Poliphilo’s world. This reversal becomes all the more pronounced considering how the tactility of Nausicaa’s messy trousseau gives way to fully fledged architectural pandemonium in Hypnerotomachia.
As the protagonist digresses in the warped space-time of dreaming, Polia’s narrative comes to fold the creative potential of Poliphilo’s imagination back to the source of its departure: a mundane room in fifteenth-century Treviso. And when Poliphilo finally awakens, he is alone. Polia has vanished, along with the architectural fantasies that populated his dream. Her ultimate disappearance signals the most radical gesture in a book that wrestles with the enigma of its own creation.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 28, 2022

author: Demetra Vogiatzaki


text:
The Revolutionary Colossus

By Samantha Wesner
December 10, 2020

As the French Revolution entered its most radical years, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Samantha Wesner traces the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s Bastille-breaking giant to a latter incarnation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Between thick dungeon walls, a giant lies asleep. He’s chained to the ground, large limbs folded, enmeshed in a web of ropes, a blindfold over his closed eyes. Suddenly, as if touched by a flame, he awakes, and gazes around in amazement. He starts up, shreds the ropes entangling him, breaks chains, smashes walls, and rises to his feet. Towering over the world, shadow stretching out below, he calls out with a voice like thunder.
It could be an early scene in a monster movie. In fact, it’s an image of the French Revolution. The depiction appears in “The Economy of Vegetation”, part one of The Botanic Garden, a mind-bending meditation on life and the universe written by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin:
Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA’S plainsInglorious slept, unconscious of his chains;Round his large limbs were wound a thousand stringsBy the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;O’er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,And steely rivets lock’d him to the ground;While stern Bastile with iron cage inthrallsHis folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazedThe flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;Starts up from earth, above the admiring throngLifts his Colossal form, and towers along;High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears,Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears;Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rollsLike Heaven’s own thunder round the echoing poles;Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl’d,And gathers in its shade the living world!
Published in 1791 — two years after the abolition of the Ancien Régime, but before the institution of the First Republic and the ensuing chaos — the vignette recounts the beginning of the French Revolution as the story of a Colossus awakening from centuries of feudal slumber. It shows collective action, Leviathan-style, in the movements of an anthropomorphic embodiment of the people, dramatizing their uprising and their destruction of the Bastille. And this figure, of a composite, revolutionary Colossus, can be seen in poetry, political commentary, and printed illustration from the late eighteenth century onwards. We can trace a kind of monstrous genealogy, culminating in what is arguably another representation of the French Revolution, Frankenstein’s creature.
The first great figure in this line of descent is Darwin’s “Giant-form”, who is well beyond human scale. Above his enemies, the giant’s “hundred arms” brandish pruning hooks and plowshares, symbols of a universalized Third Estate. And though he sleeps on “Gallia’s plains”, the giant is not particularly French; he calls out to universal categories of “the Good and Brave”. The vignette describes the awakening of a kind of everyman-Colossus, with no superpowers but the tools of manual labor in his (many) hands.
When Darwin imagined revolutionary France this way, he tapped into a broader cultural imaginary. Two years after the publication of The Botanic Garden, at artist-deputy Jacques-Louis David’s suggestion, the Jacobins chose Hercules as a symbol of revolutionary, republican France. Historian Lynn Hunt writes of how Hercules replaced both the human-scale Marianne and the female figures such as Liberty and Justice from the allegorical pantheon during the most radical years of the revolution.1 In one sketch from this period, the French Hercules tramples a hydra representing “federalism”, the provincial movements of resistance to the revolutionary center.
Like Darwin’s giant, the Jacobin Hercules embodies the contradictions of a mythic everyman. David wanted “work” (travail) written on each hand. And in political cartoons, Hercules became a vrai sans-culotte — this Colossus is nothing other than your average working man, only larger. In a sketch for a statue to be placed on the most embattled French borders, the sans-culotte Colossus holds a tiny king over a flame, Hercules’ club poised to strike; it’s an image of “The People, King-Eater”.
But for all his ordinariness, the fact that this Colossus moved was wondrous, or monstrous, or both. “The tocsin and the cannon of alarm awakened [the people’s] patriotism, announcing that liberty was in danger”, declared Jacobin deputy Joseph Fouché, describing the purging of the moderate Girondins from the Convention, in late May and early June 1793: “The forty-eight sections armed themselves and were transformed into an army”. This was all a straightforward history, albeit recounted in a propagandizing register. But suddenly Fouché slipped into the present tense:
This formidable colossus is standing, he marches, he advances, he moves like Hercules, traversing the Republic to exterminate this ferocious crusade that swore death to the people.2
The Colossus, made up of the forty-eight sections of Paris like so many body parts, on the march, is awe-inspiring and terrifying. In a sense, the sans-culotte Hercules is stepping in to fill a symbolic void at the heart of the new democratic order. This anthropomorphic representation of the people’s collective power drew upon the previous century’s most compelling theories of sovereignty. In Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan of 1651, written in the context of the English Civil War, the people, by contract, irrevocably ceded sovereign power to an “Artificial Man”, whose every act is in some sense a collective act. In Fouché’s imagery too, the sans-culotte Colossus-Hercules in theory collects the power of the people into a single body, a body whose movements are at once the movements of the people.
The revolutionary Colossi stood on the edge between miraculousness and monstrousness. After the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794, monstrous depictions of revolution abounded, ushering in the conservative backlash of Thermidor, named for the month in the revolutionary calendar in which Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined. In one example, British caricaturist James Gillray, best known for his satirizing of Napoleon, depicted a French Colossus astride the Mediterranean, hands and feet dripping blood. The skull-like head, crawling with snakes, stands in stark contrast to the decapitated but quite human head of Louis Capet (as the revolutionaries referred to Louis XVI), strung around the Colossus-monster’s neck. From the clouds, a British lightning bolt decapitates this aberration of a body politic. The giant body disintegrates at the same blow, arms and legs falling to pieces as the arms and legs of an enormous clay figurine might. An embodiment of the nation no more, Gillray’s French Colossus comes apart bloodlessly as no real body would. As Louis Sebastien Mercier wrote of a destroyed statue of Louis XV in the early years of the revolution, “Yes, it was all hollow, power and statue!”3
Yet not all sovereign power is hollow in Gillray’s image. “Shall the Lightning not blast the Image, which the destroyers have set up against the God of Heaven & against His Laws?” the caption asks. The illustration appears to answer: yes, it will, by virtue of another Colossus, Great Britain, which emerges from the clouds with a fist full of lighting bolts. As Kevin Duong explores in his 2017 essay “Flash Mob”, though the lightning bolt had long been associated with traditional forms of sovereign power, the French revolutionaries appropriated the device — and all its associations with the scientific ideas so vital to their project — as a key symbol of the all-important people’s will. It seems all the more cutting then that it is lightning, in the hands of the more traditional sovereignty of the British, which rends the French Colossus limb from limb in Gillray’s image.
To the conservative imagination, revolution was not only monstrous but cannibalistic — a Thermidorian variation on “The People, King-Eater”. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, revolution was “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it”.4 French Thermidorian prints reflected this verdict in their own way. In Les Formes acerbes, a human figure stands on a pile of corpses. With a stance befitting a would-be Colossus, he drinks steaming blood, fresh from the guillotine, as if to transform himself into something more than human by the drink. The figure is Joseph le Bon, a Jacobin representative sent from Paris to the provinces during The Terror to bring rebels in the north of France to heel. Furies and leopards stand by, “worthy companions of this Cannibal”, ready to devour the remains of Le Bon’s victims. Terror is written in the gestures and faces of the group to the left, as they supplicate the Convention. Like Gillray, the print depicts another perversion of sovereignty, this time in the figure of the Cannibal representative, a human being who makes himself monstrous.
Sometimes in the conservative imagination, the Jacobin was not himself monstrous, but instead enlisted monsters to “sow Crime and Terror” alongside him. In an anonymous Thermidorian print, it’s not the revolution itself embodied, but Discord, a wiry, snake-haired woman slightly larger than the Jacobin. In an echo of the sans-culotte Colossus, the Jacobin holds Hercules’ club as if to demonstrate his control over the people’s violence, which he might call upon if he has to. He offers up a scroll labeled “Revolutionary Government” authorizing Discord to do her worst. “Nasty Crooks, thanks to God, your reign is over”, the caption reads.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, came decades after the Jacobins and cast a backwards glance toward the revolution’s promise. Mary Shelley, the eighteen-year-old daughter of two late-Enlightenment philosophers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, gazed back at the revolution with all the gloomy judgment of a teenager reflecting on her parents’ utopian schemes. Shelley’s parents had seen great potential in the French revolutionary promise. In this they shared the sentiment of a generation of English onlookers inspired by a politics modeled on nature, rooted in rationalism. In the words of the early Romantic poet William Wordsworth,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!5
But Mary Shelley’s own youth took place against the backdrop of a violent decade of European warfare, as Napoleon Bonaparte traversed the continent, the self-proclaimed representative of French freedom and liberty. Shelley’s birth in 1797 caused the death of her mother, and coincided with the coup that transformed what was left of French revolutionary democracy into dictatorship. Critics have read Shelley’s story as a parable of the dual nature of the revolutionary moment: the scientific, rational Frankenstein and the lonely, love-lorn, murderous creature, trapped in a struggle to the death.6 As scientist-representatives brought to life a revolutionary Colossus, so Frankenstein, driven by a feverish, misguided impulsion, brought to life a “hideous progeny”.7 The result is a killing spree of innocents as creature and creator crisscross the continent. And like Darwin’s giant, the revolutionary Colossi, and the Thermidorian monsters, Frankenstein’s creature is unnamed.
As in Les Abominables, Theodore Von Holst’s 1831 frontispiece to Frankenstein sets two figures, creator and monster, together in the frame. But here, there is no evil conniving, only shock and creeping horror. Both creator and creature appear almost innocently stunned by what has happened, Frankenstein looking down at his monstrous offspring as he beats a hasty retreat, the creature looking blankly shocked to be alive, in contrast with the skeleton lying supine between his legs.
The crazed Dr Frankenstein of James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation watches the hand of his creature lift and tremble and exclaims, “Look, it’s moving. It’s alive!” That coming-to-life of an artificially assembled creature is the crux of the horror of Frankenstein in cultural memory. A poster for the film has the creature breaking through a kind of black void, emphasizing the terror provoked by the mere fact of his movement. The animation of the revolutionary Colossus is likewise key to its appeal. When Fouché describes the Paris sections coming together to form a body, it’s the liveliness of that body, manifested in its movement, that awes and terrifies. With Darwin too, the revolution begins when the giant awakes and stands.
What moves the monster? What is the animating force? In Frankenstein, though Shelley never made it explicit, there are implications within the text that a kind of galvanic electricity is at work. In addition, her introduction to the revised 1831 text of Frankenstein mentions such concepts: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured”. Derived from the late eighteenth-century vitalist theory that living beings were naturally electrical, galvanism fascinated Shelley and her circle.8 No surprise, then, that her creature is brought to life by a vital, electrical spark. In Darwin’s poem too, composed nearly three decades earlier, electricity plays an animating role. If we scan back only a few lines from his giant who is “Touch’d by the patriot-flame”, we learn how this patriot-flame starts a revolution:
The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran,Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man.
Here Darwin describes the American Revolution, but the flame is the same. From hill to hill and from man to man, this American patriot-flame, with its “electrising” power, reaches the colossal being, chained up in the Bastille.
The Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français, published in Gottingen in 1795, defines a new verb, “to electrify”, as an invention of the French Revolution:
TO ELECTRIFY. V. This verb is used in the same way as the adjective to express great movements of the soul and the tremors that they make others feel in animating the same fervor. (The news of the victories electrified all the hearts of the defenders of the country….The intrepid defenders of the country covered in honorable wounds need only to appear in public scenes to _electrify_ them by their presence. Victory electrified the People. It was the necessity of mounting a defense that electrified the courage and the energy of the Roman People, multiplying its force a hundredfold, turning it into a Colossus.)9
According to this dictionary of new, French-Revolutionary expressions, electrification turns the people into a Colossus, awakening and energizing the body politic, solving the mystery of collective movement. In this case, the Colossus goes to war, electrified by the need for defense. The Colossus, or monster, becomes a way of imagining embodied revolution, set in motion, for better or worse depending on one’s politics, by a vital spark.
Placing the revolutionary Colossi in a genealogy that stretches from Darwin’s Bastille giant through to Frankenstein’s horrific creature invites us to consider the particular emotional register within which each appears. The exercise reveals an inverse relationship between size and degree of horror. In Darwin, the giant is grand and glorious, the size of the earth itself; in Fouché he is scarier and smaller, traversing the republic on a ruthless exterminating mission. In Thermidorian prints and in British caricature, he is a hollow aberration of a body politic, or a would-be Colossus who instead becomes a monstrous cannibal as he drinks the blood of the guillotine. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature is somewhat larger than a man, and downright horrifying, doubly so because we sympathize with him. And there is something else in the shift from Darwin’s titanic giant, awakened by patriot-flame, to Shelley’s creature, jolted into life by a scientist in the grip of a feverish, misguided, creative impulsion. If for Darwin, revolution could be allegorized to the electrified awakening of an embodied Third Estate, then Frankenstein allegorizes a revolution stripped of both its epic scale and its promise. Our attention shifts from the patriot-flame and the Colossus to the “modern Prometheus” of Shelley’s subtitle, who gave fire to mankind and lived to regret it.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 10, 2020

author: Samantha Wesner