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illuminated-pages-from-15th-century-breviaries

Illuminated pages from 15th century Breviaries Mar 19, 2012 A breviary (from Latin brevis, 'short' or 'concise') is a liturgical book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church containing the public or canonical prayers, hymns, the Psalms, readings, and notations for everyday use, especially by bishops, priests, and deacons in the Divine Office (i.e., at the canonical hours or Liturgy of the Hours, the Christians' daily prayer). Below is a selection of illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century.

public-domain-review

Mar 19, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:42.228655

musaeum-clausum-1684

Musaeum Clausum (1684) Apr 10, 2012 In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of ‘remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’. His list of desired items includes an ostrich’s egg engraved with a scene from the battle of Alcazar, a ring found in the belly of a fish (reputed to be the ring of the Doge of Venice with which he annually weds the sea), the mummified body of one Father Crispin of Toulouse, and ‘Batrachomyomachia, or the Homerican battle between frogs and mice, neatly described upon the chizel bone of a large pike’s jaw’.

public-domain-review

Apr 10, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:42.689371

the-battle-of-san-pietro-1945

The Battle of San Pietro (1945) Mar 8, 2012 Documentary directed by John Huston who was commissioned by the US army to record their efforts to take Italy in the Battle of San Pietro Infine in 1943. The US Army ended up refusing to show the film because it was too honest in its portrayal of the high cost of battle and the difficulties faced. Huston and his crew were attached to the US Army’s 143rd regiment of the 36th division. Though a few scenes seem to be have been reconstructed outside of actual fighting, unlike many other military documentaries Huston’s cameramen did film alongside the infantrymen as they fought their way up the hills to reach San Pietro. These cameramen were in just as much danger as the soldiers on the ground, often within a few feet of mortars and shells exploding and bullets ricocheting nearby. The film is unflinching in its realism and was held up from being shown to the public by the United States Army. Huston quickly became unpopular with the Army, not only for the film but also for his response to the accusation that the film was anti-war. Huston responded that if he ever made a pro-war film, he should be shot. Because it showed dead GIs wrapped in mattress covers, some officers tried to prevent troopers in training from seeing it, for fear of it upsetting morale. General George Marshall came to the film's defense, stating that because of the film's gritty realism, it would make a good training film. The depiction of death would inspire them to take their training seriously. Subsequently the film was used for that purpose. Huston was no longer considered a pariah; he was decorated and made an honorary major. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Mar 8, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:43.144023

plates-from-spiegel-s-de-formato-foetu-liber-singularis-1626

Plates from Spiegel’s De formato foetu liber singularis (1626) Apr 2, 2012 Giulio Cesare Casseri, also known as Casserio, was born in about 1552 in Piacenza. His father died when he was young leaving his family poor, so when he attended medical school at the University of Padua he did so as the servant of another student. Later he was a servant to the noted Fabricius ab Aquapendente (ca. 1533-1619), whose chair in surgery and anatomy Casseri later filled. He was especially known during his lifetime for his research into the anatomy of the speech and auditory organs. In about 1600, he began work on an anatomical atlas covering the entire human body, which he still had not completed at the time of his death in 1616. In fact, it has been conjectured that Fabricius stopped its publication in 1616 because of a rivalry between the two. Adriaan van de Spiegel, sometimes known as Spigelius, was born in Brussels in 1578. After studying medicine and philosophy in Louvain, he went to the University of Padua to study medicine under Casseri and Fabricius. Becoming an expert in anatomy, surgery, and botany, Spiegel made a name for himself practicing in Germany, Hungary, and Moravia. In 1616, he was appointed to the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua after Casseri's death, and he died in that city on April 7, 1625. At the time of Adriaan van de Spiegel's death, his son in law, another physician named Liberale Crema (fl. 1626) edited Spiegel's unillustrated anatomical text, De formato foetu liber singularis. To accompany it, he obtained nine copperplate engravings which Casseri had created either for a work on general anatomy or one specifically on fetal development. The plates are the work of Titian's student Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), and engraver, Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560); the same artist and engraver who created Casseri's plates for his anatomical magnum opus which were published with Spiegel's text, De humani corporis fabrica libri decem (Venice, 1627).

public-domain-review

Apr 2, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:43.665956

hand-book-of-the-carnival-containing-mardi-gras-its-ancient-and-modern-observance-1874

Hand Book of the Carnival, Containing Mardi-Gras, its Ancient and Modern Observance (1874) Feb 21, 2012 Fascinating little book offering a brilliantly detailed insight into the 19th-century New Orleans Mardi-Gras tradition, including a history of the Mistick Krewe of Comus, The Twelfth Night Revellers, and The Knights of Momus. From Wikipedia: In Greek mythology, Comus or Komos (Ancient Greek: Κῶμος) is the god of festivity, revels and nocturnal dalliances. He is a son and a cup-bearer of the god Bacchus. Comus represents anarchy and chaos. His mythology occurs in the later times of antiquity. During his festivals in Ancient Greece, men and women exchanged clothes. He was depicted as a young man on the point of unconsciousness from drink. He had a wreath of flowers on his head and carried a torch that was in the process of being dropped.

public-domain-review

Feb 21, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:44.146732

35mm-stock-footage

35mm Stock Footage Mar 21, 2012 A fantastic new collection titled "35mm Stock Footage" has recently been uploaded to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Digitized into HD from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Much of the footage is "process plates" -- film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies. Here we have included a few highlights from the bunch - above: miniature shots of a flooding river carrying away a model house and a small plane crashing in the jungle - below: various war related footage including beautiful shots of a convoy of tanks crossing a river at night under fire, and beneath that aerial footage of military planes in flight (with some athletes running round a track sneaking in at the end). We also recommend checking out the outtakes from these early shorts.

public-domain-review

Mar 21, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:44.633069

natural-history-of-shakespeare-being-selections-of-flowers-fruits-and-animals-1877

Natural History of Shakespeare; Being Selections of Flowers, Fruits, and Animals (1877) Mar 13, 2012 Collection of little snippets from Shakespeare's plays pertaining to the natural world: Garden Flowers, Wild Flowers, Weeds, Trees, Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Spices and Medicines, Grain, Birds, Animals, Fish, Reptiles, and Insects.

public-domain-review

Mar 13, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:45.167495

an-alphabet-of-history-1905

An Alphabet of History (1905) Mar 27, 2012 "Who frets about the mystery / Enshrouding all of history / On reading this will, maybe, see / We've made it plain as ABC." From Alexander The Great, "a victim of fate", to Zenobia, "the empress of Palmyra" - an illustrated ABC set to verse of history's big players (at least as envisaged in 1905).

public-domain-review

Mar 27, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:45.685595

stack-o-lee-blues-ma-rainey-1926

Stack O’ Lee Blues - Ma Rainey (1926) Apr 9, 2012 Ma Rainey (1886–1939) was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues. She began performing at the age of 12 or 14, and recorded under the name Ma Rainey after she and Will Rainey were married in 1904. They toured with F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels and later formed their own group called Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. From the time of her first recording in 1923 to five years later, Ma Rainey made over 100 recordings. Some of them include, Bo-weevil Blues (1923), Moonshine Blues (1923), See See Rider (1924), Black Bottom (1927), and Soon This Morning (1927). (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:46.147138

out-of-the-inkwell-the-tantalizing-fly-1919

Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly (1919) Mar 9, 2012 Max Fleischer (1883–1972) was a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations. One of these was the Rotoscope, a technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement frame by frame. The technique was used to create his "Out of the Inkwell" series for Bray Studios. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Mar 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:46.615985

life-and-passion-of-christ-1903

Life and Passion of Christ (1903) Apr 6, 2012 From Internet Archive: La Vie et la passion de Jesus Christ is a 1903 French silent film directed by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and is believed to be the first feature film to have colorized sequences. Colorization was achieved using the Pathecolor/Pathechrome stencil-based film tinting process, which had been invented around 1903 by Pathe Freres, one of the most important and innovative film companies in history. The film itself is a straightforward telling of the story of Jesus Christ, but does include some events usually omitted in films about Christ, like the Transfiguration. La Vie is filmed using a single camera mostly kept still in front of the set and capturing the actors and action as it unfolds. The only known cast members are Madame Moreau as Virgin Mary and Monsieur Moreau as Joseph.

public-domain-review

Apr 6, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:47.133482

poet-and-peasant-overture-played-on-the-banjo-1925

Poet and Peasant Overture played on the Banjo (1925) Apr 8, 2012 "King of the Banjo" Eddie Peabody with a rearrangement for the banjo of Franz von Suppé's "Poet and Peasant Overture" originally dating from 1846.

public-domain-review

Apr 8, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:47.604018

alice-in-wonderland-1915

Alice in Wonderland (1915) Mar 22, 2012 1915 silent film adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, directed and written by W.W. Young and starring Viola Savoy as Alice. This is a tinted and shorter cut of the film. There is an untinted longer version (though lower quality) here. Included above are two versions: the film without sound or the film with a nice soundtrack added by the original Internet Archive uploader (though be aware that the copyright info on the early vinyl recording used is unknown).

public-domain-review

Mar 22, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:48.063389

odilon-redon-a-edgar-poe

A Remembrance of Aerial Forms: Odilon Redon’s À Edgar Poe (1882) Text by Hunter Dukes May 11, 2021 Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was many things: a painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and pastellist, who, over the course of his career, developed a singular style that fed both the decadent symbolism of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth. One of France’s most influential, yet (still) relatively unknown visionaries, he etched disembodied eyeballs and smudged ballooning minds in charcoal chiaroscuro, floating through a bardo between death and hell. His atmospheric melancholia bridged the Gothic with Surrealism, focusing on three types of landscape: nocturnal, autumnal, lunar. He had a naturalist’s talent for biological insight, but refracted through the medieval bestiary, and summoned figures mired so deeply in ugliness that they emerge both uncannily cute and unsuspectedly evocative. Like Francisco de Goya, writes the curator Jodi Hauptman, Redon “traffics in the monstrous and the diabolic, in distortion and degeneration, and deploys line, shadow, and hue to induce sensations of unease and dread”. But, alongside these idiomatic images of anguish, Redon is perhaps best remembered as an artist who influenced (and was influenced by) some of the most electric currents of nineteenth-century literature, both in English and in French. Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, spent thirty years trying to write about the temptation of Saint Anthony, which, as Colin Dickey argues, found its ultimate realization in Redon’s adaptation of the novel to a series of prints. The French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, who shared Redon’s taste for deformity, described the painter’s typical subject matter in his novel À rebours (1884), helping draw attention to an artist still struggling for recognition: . . . figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled the ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate man still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs were beyond anything imaginable; they leaped, for the most part, beyond the limits of painting and introduced a fantasy that was unique, the fantasy of a diseased and delirious mind. Later, this same character describes how Redon seems to have transposed Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, their “mirages of hallucination and effects”, into a different medium. Indeed, it is in a series of six lithographic dreamworlds titled À Edgar Poe, where we find some of Redon’s most evocative works. “What is astonishing in the Poe-Redon fusion”, writes Marina van Zuylen, is that “both artists yearned for rules of composition while portraying creatures that were unruly and decomposing”. In Un masque sonne le glas funèbre (A mask sounds the death knell), for instance, a face detached from any skull chimes a church bell with its skeletal hand. Here the end of life becomes literal disintegration, recalling Poe’s poem “The Bells”, which begins with festal jingling (birth, marriage) and then decays into the jangling repetition of a dissonant virge: They are neither man nor woman—      They are neither brute nor human—                  They are Ghouls:            And their king it is who tolls;            And he rolls, rolls, rolls,                        RollsA pæan from the bells! In other images from the À Edgar Poe series, Redon alludes to Poe while also playing out his own poetics of sight. The pièce de résistance, perhaps, in this regard, is captioned L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers L’INFINI (The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts toward Infinity). To figure out where Redon alights on Poe requires some critical stitching, like Frankenstein assembling the cemetery organs. Van Zuylen connects Redon’s hot-air eyeball to a passage from Poe’s “Berenice”, a late story that picks up one of the author’s favorite themes: the parallel between intellectual realization and erotic longing. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning eyes—of sounds, musical yet sad—a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist. While Redon later downplayed his interest in the American author, claiming that he made the lithographs as a gambit for fame, his deep immersion in Poe’s oeuvre becomes all the more visible the longer we look. You can browse the complete À Edgar Poe series below (and three of them for sale as prints in our shop here).

public-domain-review

May 11, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:48.864291

denis-diderot-letter-on-the-blind

Seeking Enlightenment: Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 24, 2021 When James Joyce — who named his daughter “Lucia” after the patron saint of eyesight, hoping for intercession from his degenerating vision — met Marcel Proust in May, 1922, at a Parisian hotel, he chalked up the awkward encounter to the French novelist’s nocturnal lifestyle. “Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.” Almost two centuries earlier, the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot visited Puiseaux, just south of Paris, to meet a person “of good solid sense” who had been born blind. Arriving at five in the afternoon, he finds the man amid his morning routine. “He had only been up for an hour, for I must tell you the day begins for him when it is ending for us.” Despite the man’s lack of sight and preference for midnight oil, Diderot discovers that the situation is far from “impossible”: they have a conversation about the world of sight and his host exhibits a sophisticated understanding of optics, describing a mirror, for example, as an object that “sets things in relief at a distance from themselves”. Diderot is delighted. “Had Descartes been born blind”, effuses the philosopher, “he might, I think, have hugged himself for such a definition.” When Diderot wrote his Lettre sur les aveugles (translated into English as Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See), in which this story appears, blindness had become a topic of philosophical debate. As Mark Paterson notes in Seeing with the Hands, after René Descartes published his essay on optics, La dioptrique (1637), blindness promised to reveal “the relationship between visual clarity and epistemological certainty”. Many treatises on the nature of knowledge, for instance, contemplated those born blind (l’aveugle-né), whose vision was restored later in life. In a thought experiment proffered by William Molyneux and later taken up by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), a person born blind learns the tactile difference between a cube and sphere. After sight is magically restored, they encounter the two geometric forms on a table. Without touching the solid objects, would they be able to tell which is which? If this hypothetical seems fanciful in retrospect, it was important for one of the most controversial debates of the Enlightenment: is knowledge rational or empirical? That is, do we have an implicit, conceptual, and perhaps God-given sense of the world? Or is it derived from raw observation, whether visual or haptic? In this period, blindness also challenged what the intellectual historian Martin Jay calls the scopic regimes of modernity: those layered metaphors, in Western philosophical history, that equate knowledge and vision. Terms like insight and enlightenment preserve the primal scene from Plato’s cave allegory, where truth or “the good” is represented by the sun, toward which we must continually strive. Yet medical progress migrated these questions away from the world of allegory and onto the mid-eighteenth-century operating table. Diderot was writing during an era when, thanks to advances in cataract surgery, these questions could be tested via a scientific method. Philosophical discussions of blindness often feature hypothetical, abstract subjects in the place of real people, an optical equivalent to the Enlightenment's fascination with the idea of feral children, raised in isolation from human language and society. Diderot, however, did things differently, for he wrote about actual blind people, whom he interviewed at length — “he is at pains to include details about [his subject’s] family background, education, and household arrangements in order to create a complex image of a living human being rather than a mere abstraction”, writes the scholar Georgina Kleege. Akin to the epistolary novels that became popular in the 1740s, Diderot’s Letter on the Blind assumes the form of a real letter, penned, it seems, to his occasional lover: Madeleine d'Arsant de Puisieux, author of La femme n'est pas inférieure à l'homme (Woman is not inferior to man), an early feminist treatise. While his correspondent was combating patriarchy, Diderot voiced probing challenges to ableism, by quoting the man from Puiseaux’s response, at length, when asked if would like to have his vision restored: “If it were not for curiosity,” he replied, “I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me my hands would tell me more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes. . . I would be as well off if I perfected the organ I possess, as if I obtained the organ which I am deprived of.” In the spirit of perfecting touch, Diderot segues into an extended discussion of Nicholas Saunderson’s system of “palpable arithmetic”, a precursor to night writing and Braille. Saunderson, who held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, was blinded by smallpox in infancy and remains a largely forgotten though brilliant figure, who astounded students with cutting-edge lectures on light and color, had a love for hunting on horseback, and would supposedly offer detailed commentary on the cloud formations that passed between him and the sun during afternoon turns in the park. Despite his relatively complex and compassionate treatment of the blind, Diderot had an agenda of his own. He interlaced his letter with quiet defenses of atheism, often funneled through quotations from Saunderson, by championing the empirical, scientific method over "religiously tinged rationalism”. The letter concludes with a humorous sigh of defeat, a subtle condemnation of those who claim to know the workings of things in heaven and earth: Thus we scarce know anything, yet what numbers of books there are whose authors have all pretended to knowledge! I cannot think why the world is not tired of reading so much and learning nothing, unless it be for the very same reason that I have been talking to you for two hours, without being tired and without telling you anything. A few months after Diderot published the letter anonymously, he was arrested for his godless tone and imprisoned in Vincennes for three months at the age of thirty-five. Shortly after his release, achieved through literary connections, he gained a reputation for co-founding the Encyclopédie, one of the Enlightenment’s pivotal productions. You can browse Diderot’s Letter above, translated by Margaret Jourdain, or purchase Kate E. Tunstall's recent translation here.

public-domain-review

Jun 24, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:49.398468

the-woman-and-the-car

On the Road: The Woman and the Car (1909) Text by Hunter Dukes May 20, 2021 In the early twentieth century, Dorothy Levitt, née Elizabeth Levi (1882-1922) was “the premier woman motorist and botorist [motorboat driver] of the world”. The first Englishwoman to drive in a public competition, she triumphed during races in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, defeated all challengers at the Championship of the Seas in Trouville, and set the women’s world record in the Brighton Speed Trials: a whopping 79.75 miles per hour — lightspeed, circa 1905. Like many larger-than-life figures, her origin story is modest, accidental, and layered with hearsay. As a child, she enjoyed cycling, horse-riding, and had a natural talent for riflery. One day, a friend of her parents came to visit their family home in the West Country, leaving his automobile idle for the long weekend. When it was time for the visitor to leave, Levitt had already mastered the physics of petrol combustion. At least, that’s the story we get from C. Byng-Hall, in his prefatory remarks to Levitt’s The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor (1909). Other biographical tidbits suggest that Levitt worked as secretary for Selwyn Edge, a racing enthusiast and businessman who first popularized the six-cylinder engine, and who, in a bid for publicity, may have handed Levitt the keys. As Jean Williams argues in her contemporary history of women’s sport, Levitt’s West Country heritage has remained “unsubstantiated so far”, a possible autobiographical stunt to obscure her Jewish descent. Before long, however, Levitt was known for burning rubber around the world, often accompanied by her Pomeranian, whom she called Dodo. (Other racers poked fun at her eccentricities by pinning plush canine emblems to their racing caps.) The Woman and the Car is a practical, how-to guide for those who wanted to take to the roads, but did not quite know how. Many of the extensive recommendations regarding mechanics, etiquette, and the temptations of car culture hold true today. There have always been lemons, it seems, for Levitt remains skeptical of purchasing second-hand cars advertised “as good as new”. And like many enthusiasts, Levitt refused to share her wheels with others. “I have made it a rule never to allow any one to drive my own little car—and this is a rule that every one will find useful.” In Levitt’s “little handbook”, we find a similar hunger for the fraught freedom of the road that would eventually preoccupy the mid-century American imagination — exploited in novels like On the Road and Lolita, and in films such as Easy Rider — and which continues to provide a mesh of mechanist escapism in the British television program Top Gear: There may be pleasure in being whirled around the country by your friends and relatives, or in a car driven by your chauffeur; but the real, the intense pleasure, the actual realisation of the pastime comes only when you drive your own car. Long before motoring became the dull labor of suburban commuting, it held the mystique of an emergent individualism — aimed here, with the reference to chauffeurs and countryside friends, at a certain class of leisurous ladies. “If you stop the night at a friend’s house”, Levitt proffers somewhat cryptically, “you will find it spick and span in the morning with water in the tank and your petrol-tank also replenished”. Oh to have friends like Levitt’s. . . Other advice in the “chatty little handbook” is wonderfully dated, providing an ossified image of a different motoring era. She recommends, for instance, a single-cylinder engine for women drivers. And her prose swells with delight while describing a proto-version of the glove compartment: “This little drawer is the secret of the dainty motoriste.” On the topic of dress, Levitt offers definitive advice. “As to head-gear, there is no question: the round cap or close-fitting turban of fur are the most comfortable and suitable”. Should you find yourself driving alone on the highways and byways, she thinks you ought to carry a small revolver and even suggests a specific make. “I have an automatic ‘Colt,’ and find it very easy to handle as there is practically no recoil.” Though, as she concedes, this only works if, like her, you “practice continually at a range”. There is a kind of merciless practicality throughout. While Levitt advises “to sound the hooter” when approaching pedestrians, she has no time for other creatures interfering on the road. “Dogs, chickens and other domestic animals at large on the highway are not pedestrians, and if one is driving at a regulation speed, or under, one is not responsible for their untimely end.” Above all else, The Woman and the Car endures as a pamphlet of petro-feminist empowerment: ※※Indexed under…VehiclesFears of crowds and mice overcome by driving You may be afraid, as I am, of driving in a hansom through the crowded streets of town—you may be afraid of a mouse, or so nervous that you are startled at the slightest of sudden sounds—yet you can be a skilful motorist, and enjoy to the full delights of this greatest of out-door pastimes, if you possess patience —the capacity for taking pains. She ends her treatise with a reflection on recent historical progress. “Twenty or thirty years ago, two of the essentials to a motorist—some acquaintance with mechanics and the ability to understand local topography—were supposed to be beyond the capacity of a woman’s brain.” Levitt was not only instrumental in advancing equality behind the steering wheel, she also forever altered the automobile form. Decades before rearview mirrors became standard issue, she recommended that ladies carry a hand mirror, for holding up to the landscape receding in their dusty tracks. Above, you can browse The Woman and the Car in full. Below, you will find a gallery of photographs by Horace W. Nicholls, illustrating Levitt’s tips.

public-domain-review

May 20, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:49.856690

japanese-fireworks-catalogues

Flowers of Fire: Illustrations from Japanese Fireworks Catalogues (ca. 1880s) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 29, 2021 The spinning saxon, flying pigeons, polka batteries, jumping jacks and firecrackers, squibs and salutes, Aztec Fountains, Bengal Lights, and Egyptian Circlets, bangers or bungers, cakes, crossettes, candles, and a Japanese design known as kamuro (boys haircut), which looks like a bobbed wig teased out across the stratosphere. . . the language of fireworks has a richness that hints at the explosive payload it references. And yet, anyone who has ever held their camera up to the blazing sky knows that a brilliant firework show can rarely be captured to any satisfying degree. Perhaps this is what makes a nineteenth-century series of catalogue advertisements for Japanese fireworks so mesmerizing: denied the expectations of photorealism, these images are free to evoke a unique sense of visual wonder. Thought to have been invented in China around the second century BCE, fireworks began as modest bamboo sparklers, advancing toward today’s complex pyrotechnic spectacles with the piecemeal discovery of saltpeter, gunpowder, tubular projectiles, and colorizing salts. While Chinese and European firework histories are heavily documented, Japan’s traditions remain moderately more obscure. Despite excellent pyrotechnic craftsmanship, for example, it was still possible for researchers to write, as recently as 2010, that “comprehensive information encompassing the development of fireworks culture in Japan, the history, and any intricate symbolism, is not widely known or appreciated within Japan, let alone abroad.” Fireworks appeared in Japan sometime around 1600 and were called hanabi — a combination of the kanji “fire” and “flower”. Japanese innovations have been responsible for a pair of popular firework forms: peonies and chrysanthemums, two subcategories of the larger class of warimono designs. Excellence in craftsmanship arose from competition in nineteenth-century Edo between hanabishi (firework artisans) on either side of Ryōgoku Bridge. As the story is told, passersby would shout Kayiga or Tamaya — the names of the rival master craftsmen — and these names are still shouted during fireworks events in the area today. The rivalry lasted until 1843, when an explosion in the Tamaya shop led to the expulsion of the business from Edo. The illustrations below come from catalogues digitized by the Yokohama City Library, which contain English-language advertisements for Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks, published by C. T. Brock and Company, the oldest fireworks manufacturer in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1877, the Hirayama company was global from its onset: the founder Jinta Hirayama is thought to have been the first Japanese citizen to register a U.S. copyright. Of the many intriguing images in these catalogues, it is their inclusion of complex figures, which seem pyrotechnically impossible, that most captivates the contemporary eye. To understand these scintillating and unfamiliar forms (daylight bombshells, parachute light-balls), it is helpful to go back into the annals of a British fireworks dynasty. Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making (1922) is written by a man “the eighth generation of a family of pyrotechnists”: Alan St. Hill Brock, a descendent of John Brock, who founded Brock’s Fireworks Ltd in 1698, publisher of the catalogues under question and still in existence today. According to Brock the author, daylight fireworks originated in Japan and were not really “fireworks” as we have come to know them. Instead of pyrotechnic effects, the daylight projectile contained “a grotesque balloon in the form of an animal, human figure, or other form, which, being open and weighted at the lower end, becomes inflated as it falls and remains in the air for a considerable period.” In the catalogue images gathered here, you will see daylight balloons shaped like frogs, mounted jockeys, and a tortoise-riding fisherman (probably the fairytale protagonist Urashima Tarō, on a journey to the submarine Dragon Palace). Other “daylight bombshells” appear as collections of objects — somersaulting umbrellas, giant jellybeans — or abstract smears of rich pigments dyeing the sky. Some diurnal fireworks, it seems, functioned more like smoke bombs or piñatas, creating “coloured clouds formed by coloured powder” or showering “streamers, confetti, and toys” on a rapt, land-bound audience. You might notice that several images contain balls of light suspended by parachutes: Brock’s book goes some way toward explaining the history of this technology — “the parachute light-ball” — though he credits its invention to the Danish circa 1820. (While the sections on Japan are perhaps the most illuminating, we also learn about the Green Man, fabulously illustrated by John Bate, and the forgotten pyrotechnic associations of this mythological figure that lends his name to scores of British pubs.) Despite the novelty of daylight fireworks, the Japanese “night shells” are no less disarming. While explosions were traditionally orange-colored, Hirayama was instrumental in introducing radiant displays. A keen-eyed viewer might even pick up several examples of katamono style — a rarer form of firework capable of spelling out letters and drawing stick figures or faces in the night sky. You can browse the complete catalogues of nineteenth-century Japanese fireworks through the Yokohama City Library., and browse our highlights below. For further reading, pyrotechnic enthusiasts can borrow a digital copy of George Plimpton’s ode to explosions, which discusses Japan’s Ogatsu firework family, at Internet Archive.

public-domain-review

Jun 29, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:50.395197

etidorhpa

John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa (1895) Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 7, 2021 “For eighteen years the writer has been seated at this desk and all kinds of books have been passed in review, but has never before met with such a stumper”, wrote the literary critic for Chicago’s The Inter Ocean paper in 1895. And they were not alone. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “an extraordinary literary and scientific work”, a “new candidate for popular favor”. Soon after, the book’s title became a not-uncommon baby name for bookish parents. And, as late as 1986, we find J. Soule Smith (sobriquet: “Falcon”) remarking on the text’s long legacy: “What the author thought would be the puzzle of a few has become the study of the multitude”. With a reputation such as this, you may be expecting The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Sherlock Holmes novel, or some other enduring classic. And yet, the novel under discussion is Etidorhpa; or, the End of the Earth: the Strange History of a Mysterious Being and the Account of a Remarkable Journey, John Uri Lloyd’s whimsical take on the “hollow earth” genre. Imagine the progeny of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and an experiment in automatic writing by a member of Havelock Ellis’ peyote-munching cohort. Now steep that vision in Masonic paranoia, fringe geological theories, and a surprisingly earnest account of spiritual longing. Let it age a century and only then would you have a text that begins to hold a candle to Etidorhpa. Published by the Cincinnati-based pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd in 1895, the novel features psychonautical learning long before Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. Indeed, Lloyd is somewhat frank, in scientific journal articles, about his auto-guinea-piggery. As R. J. Smith recounts, Lloyd breezily describes evaluating “the alkaloidal salts of morphine, quinine, cocaine, etc.”, by letting samples of each dissolve upon his tongue. But the author’s biography is equally mind-bending. He dined with Mark Twain, fished with Grover Cleveland, was employed by the Smithsonian to survey the licorice yields of the Ottoman Empire, and left behind one of the most remarkable private libraries in the United States. The novel’s story feels indebted both to John Symmes’ theory of “Hollow Earth” and the kidnapping of William Morgan by supposed Freemasons. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the mise-en-abymic narrative creates a formal correlate for the supernatural plot. In brief: a man named Johannes Llewellyn Llongollyn Drury, studying occult and alchemic phenomena, receives an unexpected visitor late in the night. A white-haired man teleports into his parlor. As in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, published three years after Etidorhpa, the creepiest quality of this ghostly apparition is not physical but textual. The elderly man entrusts a manuscript to our narrator, recounting events that transpired three decades earlier, and, eventually, introduces himself by the (almost) Old Testament moniker of “I—Am—The—Man—Who—Did—It”. We jump into the manuscript, which tells of the man’s kidnapping by a secret hermetic society. His captors forced him to prematurely age in order to disguise his identity. Soon after, I—Am—The—Man is indentured to a guide, whose face, “if a face it could be called, was wet, and water dripped from all parts of his slippery person. . . the moisture seemed to ooze as from the hide of a water lizard”. The lizardly usher leads the now-aged man to the underworld (the entrance of which, we learn, is to be found in Kentucky). It’s like Dante meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets contemporary internet conspiracy theories about “the reptilian elite”. As Drury and the creature descend into the earth’s interior, their ever-evolving philosophical debate finds new scenery: forests of colossal fungi; a field of Brobdingnag hands affixed to the bodies of Lilliputians; and the experience of “eternity without time”, which comes with footnotes, whose syntax seems to exhibit the very symptoms of the substance it proclaims to decry: If, in the course of experimentation, a chemist should strike upon a compound that in traces only would subject his mind and drive his pen to record such seemingly extravagant ideas as are found in the hallucinations herein pictured, or to frame word-sentences foreign to normal conditions, and beyond his natural ability, and yet could he not know the end of such a drug, would it not be his duty to bury the discovery from others, to cover from mankind the existence of such a noxious fruit of the chemist’s or pharmaceutist’s art? The novel’s title stems from an encounter with a being named “Etidorhpa”, who appears after I—Am—The—Man declines to drink a distillation of “derivates of the rarest species of the fungus family”. Instead of drugs, he is intoxicated by this seraphic creature, whose rhetorical flourishes almost eclipse her physical beauty. “The universe bows to my authority”, she says. “Stars and suns enamored pulsate and throb in space and kiss each other in waves of light; atoms cold embrace and cling together; structures inanimate affiliate with and attract inanimate structures; bodies dead to other noble passions are not dead to love.” She later introduces herself as an entity once known as Venus, but whose true name is Etidorhpa (“Aphrodite” in reverse). We will leave it to eager readers to discover how this mysterious book ends. But if the text itself is not tantalizing enough, below you can browse illustrations by J. Augustus Knapp (1853-1938), which are as unsettling as the tale that they frame.

public-domain-review

Jul 7, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:50.859659

dante-divine-comedy-in-art

700 Years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Art Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 14, 2021 A man wakes deep in the woods, halfway through life. Far from home, unpermitted to return, his heart pierced by grief. He has strayed from the path. It's a dark night of the soul, his crisis so great that death becomes a tempting end. And then, as wild beasts advance upon this easy prey, his prayers are answered. A guide appears, promising to show him the way toward paradise. . . Today marks the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri's death, the Florentine poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, arguably our most ambitious Western epic. Eschewing Latin, the medieval currency of literature and scholarship, Dante wrote in his vernacular tongue, establishing the foundations for a standardized Italian language, and, by doing so, may have laid cultural groundwork for the unification of Italy. The poet's impact on literature cannot be overstated. "Dante's influence was massive", writes Erich Auerbach, "he singlehandedly established the expressive possibilities and the landscape of all poetry to come, and he did so virtually out of thin air". And just as the classical Virgil served as Dante's guide through the Inferno, Dante became a kind of Virgil for later writers. Chaucer cribbed his rhythm and images, while Milton's Paradise Lost may have been actually lost, were it not for Dante as a shepherd. The Divina Commedia is a touchstone for works as diverse as fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan verse; Gogol's Dead Souls (1842); and Mary Shelley's Italian Rambles (1844), which finds the poet at every turn: There is scarcely a spot in Tuscany, and those parts of the North of Italy, which he visited, that Dante has not described in poetry that brings the very spot before your eyes, adorned with graces missed by the prosaic eye, and which are exact and in perfect harmony with the scene. If Dante's poetry summons landscapes before its reader's eyes, artists have tried, for the last seven hundred years, to achieve another kind of evocation: rendering the Commedia in precise images, evocative patterns, and dazzling color. By Jean-Pierre Barricelli's estimate, a complete catalogue of Commedia-inspired artworks would exceed 1,100 names. The earliest dated image comes from Florence in 1337, beginning the tradition soon after the poet's death in 1321. Before long, there were scores of other illustrations. As Rachel Owen notes, due to medieval guild production, early illustrations of the Commedia featured highly collaborative work, where a single miniature could pass through multiple hands, introducing variation in style across a single manuscript, but also conventions of representation. Spanning the Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Romanticism, the images gathered below reflect changing techniques for rendering perspective and summoning humanist pathos. While this evolution might be expected, the consistency with which artists have chosen specific Cantos from the Commedia is almost uncanny. And there are surprising gaps, as well — a dearth of Dantean images during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps in line with Goethe's quip, ca. 1824, that the Italian poet would soon be lost to obscurity. Nothing like this happened, however, for the mid-nineteenth century saw Dante's works become a popular subject for visual artists once again. There are many reasons as to why the Commedia lends itself to depiction, the most simple being: there is so much to draw upon. Titans chained deep in hell; Ugolino pausing, mid-cannibalistic chomp, to converse with Dante and Virgil; the ecstatic ascent to the Empyrean; and other, seemingly endless configurations of the abject and miraculous. The three-headed Satan has always been popular, frozen in the ninth circle of hell's last ring. In one of the earliest extant renderings, a Florentine illustration from ca. 1350, each head of the devil masticates Brutus, Judas, and Cassius: the ultimate traitors, whose treachery was itself a form of consumption: dismembering the Roman Republic and the son of God. An Early Renaissance engraving after Botticelli, but also credited to Orcagna, places Satan amid dozens of hellfiends, torturing various tormentees with saws, tridents, and snakes — gathering the evils that Dante has witnessed in previous circles. Francesco Scaramuzza returned to the same figure in the mid-nineteenth century, adding a thick layer of fur and soul piercing eyes. To get out of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil must climb up the torso of Satan, emerging near the base of Purgatory. The mountain of salvation was formed by displacement: the impact of this angel crashing to earth. This is but one of the many careful harmonies built into the Commedia's totalizing vision. The epic's structure is almost fractal: three lines per stanza; thirty-three cantos per section; and three poetic movements (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), each respectively composed of nine circles, stages, and spheres. While this structure emerges gradually in the poem, artists have long tried to plot its coordinates. Placing Botticelli's well-known, external vision of the Inferno next to a bird's-eye view of Purgatory from 1568 reveals the symmetry between the first two sections of Dante's epic. Others opt for a more abstracted approach. A 1518 diagram renders hell as a bounded, two-dimensional mineshaft, while in a series of maps from 1855, Michelangelo Caetani makes the funnel-like Malebolge resemble a honeycombed monolith, buried beneath layered earth. In Paradise, Dante is guided by his beloved Beatrice, who leads him toward the beatific vision. During Cantos 18–20, which take place in the sphere of Jupiter,  they come across the Eagle of Justice, composed of myriad souls. An early Italian miniature (ca. 1450), shows the couple floating against an ultramarine background in conversation with the eagle's more-than-fifty faces. In a late-sixteenth century illustration by an unknown artist, the eagle's souls take on the eerie aspect of skulls. Francesco Scaramuzza adds a Romantic touch, where Dante soars, eyes closed by sublimity, carried on the raptor's talons. The beatific vision, depicted both by a mid-sixteenth century woodcut and Gustave Doré (1880), capture, in juxtaposition, something of paradise's unchanging promise. The former, mandala-like arrangement positions angels in nine rings around God, while Doré — whose illustrations were so immediately influential that one critic, writing in 1861, felt that Dante and Doré were "communicating by occult and solemn conversations" — puts a blinding light in place of the divine. As hinted at by the central couple in Doré's image, the Commedia ends with an affirmation of love, at once personal, galactic, and divine. “The love that moves the other stars“ (l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle). As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Inferno and Purgatorio also end with stelle. "So when Dante says that love moves the sun and other stars, what he's really doing is placing himself immediately right back on earth, back at the beginning of his quest. He's here with us looking up at the stars." And we are here with him, as artists have been for centuries, tracing out our own paths through his heavenly designs. To commemorate the 700th anniversary of the poet's death, we have collected, below, visions of the Commedia from the last seven centuries. Each image is linked through to its source where you can often view more images in a series. And to dive further into Dante's work we highly recommend checking out Columbia University's Digital Dante project.

public-domain-review

Sep 14, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:53.432750

astronomia

Astronomia Playing Cards (1829) Text by Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes Jul 29, 2021 Hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades — every player (shark or not) is familiar with the four suits in a standard deck. But dig a little deeper into the discard pile of history and you will soon draw up cards adorned with cups, coins, clovers, acorns, and more. For shuffling enthusiasts, there is a distinction to be made between standard and nonstandard packs. The Cary Collection at Yale University holds hundreds of each variety, but it is the latter kind that catches the non-specialist eye, representing the effort to craft “an original pictorial conception”, according to William B. Keller. Forget queens and kings and instead imagine cards painted onto tan hides by Apache tribes and aces inscribed with moralizing mottos such as “use but don’t abuse me”. One particularly fine example is the Astronomia deck. Transcending the earthly concerns of betting and regal motifs, this pack focuses exclusively on the heavens. From the collection of card aficionado Melbert Cary, which contains another lovely celestial spread from c. 1717, the Astronomia pack — printed in London in 1829 and reissued in 1831 — recalls the mystical origins of playing cards. Whereas the Tarot tradition followed astrology into occult realms, this deck remains soberly astronomical. Above the skyscape on each card is a table of cosmological data for particular extra-terrestrial objects: its distance from the sun, orbital eccentricity, and progression-per-hour are displayed on decorative curtain swags. Were you to fan them across a table, it would be like gazing through fifty-two windows onto outer space, framed by classical stone columns. The deck’s otherworldly beauty makes it difficult to envision dealing out a hand (though there is a certain appeal to the idea of Saturnine bridge, lunar hold’em, or Martian cribbage). Instead, the anonymous inventor had other ideas up his sleeve: the Astronomia pack was released with an accompanying text, Explanation of the Celestial Cards, that details two games — Conjunction and Combination — with a primer on “the sublime Science of Astronomy”. As far as we can tell, they play similar to whist, requiring four players working in pairs to follow suit (that is, color-coded season) if possible, or to trump the leading card. For suits, however, Astronomia uses color-coded seasons, with Zodiac constellations and other galactic bodies, like the Great Comet of 1680, forming an ersatz royal flush. (Moons earn extra points.) The night sky has long humbled humans, inspiring us to probe deeper into the internal and external worlds. Astronomia had similar ambitions. Its prefatory manual hopes to “excite the youthful reader to seek a more extensive knowledge of this noble science, or lead him to contemplate, with reverent admiration, the power and wisdom, — the harmony and magnificence, — displayed in the construction of the Universe”. Below you will find the thirteen cards which make up the summer "suit" and you can riffle through the full Astronomia pack via the Beinecke Library at Yale.

public-domain-review

Jul 29, 2021

Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:53.899255

albert-robida-la-vie-electrique

The Future Imagined in Albert Robida’s La vie électrique (1890) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 15, 2021 Who participated in the first video date? A good couple for candidacy in this regard are Georges Lorris and Estelle Lacombe, who meet via “téléphonoscope” in Albert Robida’s 1890 novel Le Vingtième siècle: la vie électrique in which he imagines “the electric life” of the future. Adding a visual component to two recent technologies, the telephone (1876) and the phonograph (1877), this device lets scattered families in the year 1956 reunite around a virtual dinner table. For the lovebirds Lorris and Lacombe, the téléphonoscope facilitates their unapproved liaison in an immunologically fraught world. (And, for those without a beau, it also offers a service akin to on-demand streaming.) This proto Zoom / Netflix hybrid is just one of several prescient predictions in Robida’s novel. Frictionless trains shoot through tubes, anticipating the Hyperloop, and doorknockers have been replaced with a “recording phonograph with photographic lens”, allowing residents to both screen visitors and take messages in the event of their absence: a smart doorbell before its time. Biological weapons are the preferred means of warfare and have been calibrated to spare “men in the prime of their strength and health” and target, instead, “the valetudinarians, the weak, the infirm organisms unable to stand [its] putrid fumes”. (A good capitalist, Georges Lorris’s father, Philox, later secures the monopolistic right to manufacture and distribute both the weapon and its vaccine.) While marriage still exists unmodified, honeymoons are obsolete — now engaged couples take voyages de fiançailles to assess their compatibility. There are even airborne cars and taxicabs, with landing platforms affixed above the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame — as well as mass aerial transit in the form of aéronefs-omnibus. Remembered better as an illustrator than a novelist, Robida was best known for his whimsical drawings of the Belle Epoque in Paris’s La Caricature magazine, which he edited, and for writing eighty books in a variety of genres: histories, children’s stories, and travel guides. Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, The electric life has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life and our near future. “He let his imagination run wild”, writes Robert Hendrick, “and in the process more accurately predicted the technological and social developments of our contemporary world than any other forecaster of his time.” The electric life’s social progress also outpaced history. By the 1950s, according to Robida, women would work as equals in all professions, smoke in public, operate a ladies-only stock exchange (Bourse des dames), and wear trousers or miniskirts. (In a different novel that shares this same world, one of Robida’s characters describes how “the long skirts of our grandmothers were too inconvenient for climbing into aérostats and, furthermore, most forward-thinking women considered them symbols of their former slavery.”) But freedom has come at a cost — the women in Robida’s novel have been satirically “masculinised”, given names with “harsh character” and “forbidding euphony” in order to prove their seriousness. Less progressive than the future it highlights, much of Robida’s humor comes from what Philippe Willems calls “entre nous jokes between the author and his implied readers”, deriving from “the incongruity of juxtaposing nineteenth-century bourgeois values onto an extrapolated social frame”. In other words, it was easier for Robida and his audience to imagine flying cars than the empowerment of women. While his sexual politics remain disappointingly regressive, Robida anticipated how the scientific, social, and technological progress afforded by capitalism comes at an ecological cost to the planet. His version of the 1950s dissolves effortlessly into the environmental present: “Our air is dirty and polluted. . . Our rivers carry virtual purees of the most dangerous bacilli; our streams swarm with pathogenic ferments.” Technology cannot trump nature: electrical storms sweep across France disrupting the téléphonoscope. Ironically, like in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the only solution is to cling to the past — that is, Robida’s present. Dotted throughout France are quiet villages, where citizens in the novel have returned to reconstruct nineteenth-century ways of life. See more past visions of the future here, including additional works by Robida.

public-domain-review

Apr 15, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:54.348054

hatha-yoga-images-from-the-joga-pradipika

Images of Hatha Yoga from the Joga Pradīpikā (19th century) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 13, 2021 Yoga is now everywhere in the West. For some, it is connected to an ancient, ethical philosophy, “a way the sacred can come into life”, according to Stephen H. Phillips. For others, it has become a glorified stretching routine, a warm-up to be completed while decked out in athleisure garbs. Modern yoga, defined by Elizabeth De Michelis as “the graft of a Western branch onto the Indian tree of yoga”, dates back to the 1800s. De Michelis locates an origin in a letter penned by Henry David Thoreau, claiming that “To some extent, and at rate intervals, even I am a yogi” — one of the first recorded instances of yoga being “taken up by a Westerner while remaining a Westerner”. But the Classical Yoga of the Indian subcontinent has been evolving for thousands of years and can be found in various forms in the texts sacred to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Yoga is difficult to define because of its fractured immensity. The word refers to “that enormous body of spiritual values, attitudes, precepts, and techniques that have been developed in India over at least five millennia”, claims Georg Feuerstein in his canonical The Yoga Tradition. And James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, in composing their Roots of Yoga for Penguin Classics, found it necessary to translate yogic texts from Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, Old Marathi, Avadhi, Braj Bhasha, and English. The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, one of the most widely practiced modern forms, the yoga of physical discipline. As Singleton notes, however, bodily movements were historically subordinate to breathwork (pranayama), mental focus (dharana), and the yoga of sonic vibrations (nada). Only in the twentieth century, paralleling a rising Indian nationalism, does the corporal dimension begin to dominate, as certain physical strands of the yogic tradition melded with European gymnastics, creating a system to train the body in preparation for anti-colonial resistance. But these images precede the exportation of hatha to the West, finding their origin in the Joga Pradīpikā, an eighteenth-century text credited to Ramanandi Jayatarama, which combines older kinds of seated meditation with the physical methods of tantra. On display are both asanas (body postures) and mudras (hand gestures or “seals”). While the former positions promote both physical and spiritual alignment, the origins of the latter gestures remain obscure, with Feuerstein claiming that “they undoubtedly are the products of intensive meditation practice during the course of which it is not uncommon that the body spontaneously assumes certain static as well as dynamic poses”. This is the mystery and power of yoga on exhibit here — the potential for the body and mind to spontaneously transform through subtle and exacting movements. ※※Indexed under…HandsGesturing through For a history of hatha yoga’s physicality and the Joga Pradīpikā, you can watch James Mallinson’s interview with the British Library here. And you can purchase Mallinson and Singleton’s Roots of Yoga by following this link.

public-domain-review

Apr 13, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:54.774227

sylva-britannica

Joseph George Strutt’s Sylva Britannica (1822/1830) Text by Ned Pennant-Rea Jun 10, 2021 Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination, so powerfully as those venerable trees… to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime, and their decay. In Sylva Britannica, or Portraits of Forest Trees, Joseph George Strutt (1784–1867) pictures fifty special British trees in etchings and words. Beneath gnarled oaks and chestnuts deer wander, horses mosey, and goats snooze. A pig nuzzles a root, a peacock perches on a branch, a cat ponders a picnic basket. Two travellers look up in quiet awe, a young lad fools with his dog, a reclining shepherd admires his flock. This is the country life glorified and simplified. If the characters could speak one would probably be quoting Duke Senior in As You Like It: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Strutt chooses tree species long associated with Britain — oaks, elms, yews, ash — as well as a few exotic recent arrivals like cedar and oriental plane. His descriptions owe a debt to John Evelyn, author of the first thorough study of British trees, Sylva (1664), which mixed classical mythology, rhapsodic praise, and practical forestry advice — all in an effort to encourage tree planting. Strutt is more focused on the poetic side of things but nonetheless shares Evelyn’s patriotism and conception of the social value of trees: An insulated tree… seems the common property of all who raise their humble tenements within sight of its branches, and is one of the delightful ornaments of nature that the poorest cottager may enjoy and be proud of, as he sees the stranger stop to gaze at it. Perhaps there is no country in the world where an admiration of fine trees is so genuinely felt, or so generally diffused, through all ranks, as in England. A compact, cheaper edition of Strutt’s book was published in 1830, presumably to diffuse the tree love further through the ranks — a scan of which you can browse above. Below we’ve featured a selection of etchings from the original 1822 folio (vastly superior to the reproductions in the 1830 edition) with relevant extracts from the accompanying prose. *** In the year 1724, a road-way was cut through its venerable trunk, higher than the entrance to Westminster Abbey, and sufficiently capacious to permit a carriage and four horses to pass through. *** The extremity of its boughs includes a line of one hundred and eighteen feet… When it is in the full pride of its foliage, it strikes the spectator with sensations similar to those inspired by the magnificent Banyan trees of the East… It affords a… singular and striking [spectacle] in the invigorating sharpness of an autumnal morning, when its thousand boughs, and every pendent twig, are gemmed with crystals, reflecting the rays which no longer scorch, and dazzle only to please… *** Unpruned, unpollarded, throwing its broad arms around in all the freedom and majesty of its nature. It is supposed to have received its name from the accommodation it is so well calculated to afford in its ample canopy, “star-proof,” and its moss-grown roots, to the weary mendicants who may in former times have been tempted to seek the shade of its branches for repose or shelter. *** A group of oaks known by the names of Majesty, Stately, and Beauty... Seldom are three trees so different from each other in individual character, and so interesting altogether, to be found in such near proximity... The oaks can still be visited today. *** It is said by the inhabitants of the village, that seventy persons at one time got within the hollow of the trunk; but, on inquiry, I found many of these were children; and, as the tree is hollow throughout to the top, I suppose they sat on each other's shoulders: yet, without exaggeration, I believe the hollow capable of containing forty men. Here it is, looking outrageously large, 50 years later. *** The whole estate, from the very nature of its situation, forming part of the borders between England and Wales, is fraught with historical associations, which extend themselves, with pleasing interest, to this ancient “monarch of the wood,” among whose boughs the war-cry has often reverberated in former ages... *** The trunk is quite hollow, and altogether its age appears to warrant the idea that it may have witnessed in its infancy those rites and sacrifices of our Saxon ancestors which were held in these shadowy recesses, at once to increase their solemnity, and to shield them from the profane eyes of vulgar observers. *** Gog and Magog appear in the Old Testament and in Islamic manuscripts either as individuals, tribes, or lands. In the Book of Revelation they are tribes. Early Christian writers turned them into apocalyptic hordes, and throughout the medieval period they were variously identified as the Vikings, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Turanians, and other nomads. Oddly enough, another pair of oaks with the same names, but not featured in Srutt’s book, still stands at Glastonbury in Somerset — though Glastonbury Gog was damaged by fire in 2017. *** Its aperture is a small, ill-formed gothic arch, hewn out, or enlarged with an axe, and the bark now curls over the wound — a sure sign that it continues growing. *** Some years ago, this great ornament to Enfield was destined to be cut down by a gentleman who had purchased the spot on which it stood; but the contemplation of its loss excited so much regret and discontent among several of the most respectable inhabitants in the place, that he was obliged to relinquish the barbarous design, even after the trench was dug around it, the saw-pit prepared, and the axe almost lifted up for its destruction. *** The Poplar, like other trees of the aquatic tribe, copiously exudes the moisture which it imbibes; insomuch that, in hot calm weather, its foliage, like that of the Willow, is additionally grateful from the drops of water that hang upon its leaves, with the refreshing coolness of a summer shower; and which, to a poetical imagination, like that of Ovid, affords a lively picture of the tears of Phaeton's sisters for his loss, completing the beauty of the story which relates their metamorphosis. The black poplar is nowadays very rare in the UK. *** Probably the oldest tree now standing in England… Calculation takes us back to the beginning of the reign of Egbert, in the year 800... Since that epoch above a thousand years have rolled over its yet green head. How is it possible, bearing this reflexion in our minds, to look upon its gigantic trunk, and widely spreading arms, without feelings of reverence! How many, not merely generations of men, but whole nations, have been swept from the face of the earth, whilst, winter after winter, it has defied the howling blasts with its bare branches, and spring after spring put forth its leaves again... Nor is it solitary in its old age. Its progeny rises around it, and its venerable roots are nearly hidden by the lighter saplings and bushes that have sought the protection of its boughs, making it appear a grove in itself—a fit residence for some sylvan deity. *** In general, the trees which in the end obtain the greatest size, are the slowest in growth; it may therefore reasonably be inferred that the age of our largest trees is often far beyond that assigned to them by obscure tradition or vague conjecture; and it is not improbable that the “Four Sisters” may have attained their tenth century. *** The graceful stateliness of its form, and the beauty of its foliage, [presents] on one side the bright green of the emerald, and on the other a delicate relief of silvery stripes, which, when agitated by the wind, gives it an agreeable variety of appearance. *** The Fir... perhaps no where attains such perfection as… in those situations in the Highlands where it is most exposed to a northern aspect: for in proportion to the tardiness of its vegetation, in consequence of the little influence of the sun upon it for months together, it completes by slow and sure degrees the health and strength of its timber far beyond that which is nurtured to prematurity of stature in richer soils and warmer situations. This remark may be applied to all other timber trees as well as to the Fir. *** The philosophical conversations of Socrates are represented as passing under [the Plane tree's] shade.. The Romans thought their most magnificent villas imperfect unless they were sheltered by the lofty and wide-spreading Plane; and the Turks, who treat it with extraordinary reverence, plant it near their dwellings, under the idea that it sheds a salutary influence over the noxious vapours by which the plague is generated... It would be well if we could revive so much of the veneration of the ancients for the Plane, as might induce us, like them, to plant it round our Schools and new Universities: our tiros in philosophy might… inhale under its branches some of the lofty contemplations of their predecessors, practise themselves in the same habits of simplicity, and finally arrive at the same height of intellectual and moral excellence. *** ...lifting its tranquil head over humble roofs, which it has sheltered from their foundation, and affording, in the projections and points around its base, an inexhaustible source of pleasure to the train of village children who cluster like bees around it; trying their infant strength and courage in climbing its mimic precipices, whilst their parents recall, in their pastimes, the feelings of their own childhood; when, like them, they disported under the same boughs. *** The 16th-century manor house Chequers has been the country pile of British prime ministers since 1921. “The oldest special tree at Chequers is the still-sprouting stump of an Elm,” explains chilternsaonb.org, “reputed to have been planted by King Stephen (1097-1154). Unfortunately it succumbed to Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. Before it was felled, part of the main trunk was used to build a fine cabinet which can be seen in the dining room.” *** These graceful trees are surrounded by objects of the most interesting nature, their branches almost touch the venerable remains of the Abbey of Dunkeld, whilst the bleak and barren hill which was once Birnham wood rises behind in the distance, and fills the imagination of the spectator... with thoughts of Macbeth, and Dunsinane… *** At present [the sycamore] is to be found in all parts of the kingdom, especially in Scotland, where it grows to a great size, wearing an undaunted aspect, and throwing out its bold arms, as if in defiance of the utmost inclemency of the skies. *** It was planted about the year 1596... It is at the present period in full vigour and beauty, combining airy grace in the lightness of its foliage and the playful ramifications of its smaller branches, with solidity and strength in its silvery stem and principal arms. Delightful indeed is it to contemplate the variety and surpassing beauty of many of these 'houses not built with hands,' proclaiming to the viewless winds, the eyes of heaven, and the heart of man, the wisdom and the love of the Eternal Architect, whose fiat calls them into existence, and whose benevolence wills them to live for ages. *** These venerable Yew Trees stand on a small eminence... overlooking the ruins of Fountains’ Abbey, which celebrated monastery was founded about the end of the year 1132... Under these [seven yew] trees, we are told by tradition, the Monks resided till they built the monastery; which seems to be very probable, if we consider how little a Yew Tree increases in a year, and to what a bulk these are grown. And as the hill side was covered with wood, which is now almost all cut down... it seems as if they were left standing to perpetuate the memory of the Monks’ habitation there during the first winter of their residence. *** Tradition says that Henry VIII occasionally met Anne Boleyn under the lugubrious shade of its spreading branches… it afforded but too appropriate an emblem of the result of that arbitrary and ungovernable passion, which, overlooking every obstacle in its progress, was destined finally to hurry its victim to an untimely grave. *** Pennant describes it as measuring fifty-six feet and a half. The same elegant tourist also speaks of it as having formerly been united to the height of three feet… It is now however decayed to the ground, and completely divided into two distinct stems, between which the funeral processions were formerly accustomed to pass.

public-domain-review

Jun 10, 2021

Ned Pennant-Rea

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:55.298907

baldassare-castiglione-the-book-of-the-courtier

On Sprezzatura: Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1903 edition) Text by Hunter Dukes May 6, 2021 What do Cicero’s orations, the “no-makeup” makeup trend, and Marcel Duchamp’s readymade stunt of submitting a porcelain urinal to an art exhibition have in common? All champion a certain kind of nonchalance — an artfulness that conceals its own artifice. In short, all three are appreciated, not without controversy, for the inimitable essence of sprezzatura. While the qualities associated with this Italian word have been praised since the classical era, sprezzatura found a modern patron in Baldassarre Castiglione, whose The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano) holds the performance of effortlessness in highest regard. Purporting to be a series of dialogues that took place among courtiers across several evenings in the early 1500s, Castiglione’s treatise achieved widespread renown as a philosophical exploration of etiquette, courtship, and politics. By 1903, more than 140 editions had appeared in almost a dozen languages, making it one of the most distributed books of its period and kind. The Book of the Courtier is perhaps due for rediscovery in the pandemic era — which, for many, has been characterized by the boredom of waiting — as characters suggest different games in order to while away an idle evening. There are initially some odd ideas. Fra Serafino proposes what he calls a fine game that sounds no fun: “let everyone give his opinion why it is that nearly all women hold rats in hatred, and are fond of snakes; and you will see that no one will guess the reason except myself, who learned the secret in a strange way”. But we never get to hear the answer or how he happened upon this “secret”, because Emilia Pia hushes him, and, with a silent gesture, gives Unico Aretino the chance to speak. Finally, after much courtly throat-clearing, the game is decided: each will take turns “portraying a perfect Courtier, explaining all the conditions and special qualities requisite in one who deserves this title”. There are some obvious traits, quickly proposed: noble birth, charming character, skill in war. And then Count Ludovico advances his compelling proposal about sprezzatura, which he calls the “one universal rule” concerning graceful behavior: “to avoid affectation to the uttermost”, “to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura]”. Unlike later aesthetic categories such as the picturesque, this one wanted to hide the artful qualities of lived experience. There is nothing to which we must “give greater care than to conceal art, for if it is discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem”. He cites the example of classical orators, who, with monologues memorized, would pretend to extemporize, as if the language was “springing rather from nature and truth than from study and art; the which, if it had been detected, would have made men wary of being duped by it”. This is the paradoxical cocktail of qualities that define sprezzatura — the achievement of eloquence and honesty through deception and concealment. Paolo D’Angelo in Sprezzatura: Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp (translated into English in 2018) — perhaps the best study to date of Castiglione and hidden ornament — makes use of this effect in the first lines of his preface: “I suppose one could say that I’ve been working on the book for twenty years, even though I wrote it in a few months during the spring and summer of 2004”. There is a certain ease here, a studiously unstudied element. D’Angelo later quotes the Bohemian painter Raphael Mengs, who in 1762 observed that the “paintings which are commonly praised, and esteemed of good taste, are those in which one sees well express the principal objects, with a certain ease, which hides all labour and art”. Other expressions get close to Castiglione’s ideal: French has je ne sais quoi; Latin, ars est celare artem (it is art to conceal art); Japanese, iki, an adjective meaning “subtly elegant, refined with no ostentation”; but nothing captures this kind of aesthetic coolness quite like sprezzatura, which glides off the tongue almost as languidly as the style it describes. Above you can browse Leonard Eckstein Opdycke’s 1902 translation of Il Cortegiano. While the book was first translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and again in 1727, Opdycke’s effort arose from the scarcity of copies available at the century’s turn. And though our world looks a lot different than courtly life in Urbino during the Renaissance, the city on the Apennine slopes where Castiglione’s book takes place, Opdycke believes that these “pages will lack interest only when mankind ceases to be interesting to man, and will reward study so long as the past shall continue to instruct the present and the future”.

public-domain-review

May 6, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:55.774347

carroll-illustrations-for-alice-undergound

Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 22, 2021 “[W]hat is the use of a book”, asks Alice in the opening scene to Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, “without pictures or conversations?” This question from Alice is at once a critique of her sister’s pictureless tome, and a paving the way for the delight of words and images to follow. Indeed, John Tenniel’s famous illustrations — for both the first edition of Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass — have become integral to how we experience the story, in both books and film. Tenniel, however, was not the first to illustrate the tale. That honor belongs to Carroll himself, whose original manuscript of the story (then titled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”) is littered with thirty-seven of his own sepia-ink drawings. It seems this entwining of word and image — so important to the published version — was there from the beginning. Carroll's illustrations are slightly more reserved and less caricatured than John Tenniel’s efforts so familiar to us today. In a vertical sketch that stretches out across the manuscript’s right margin, spanning part of the indelible mushroom scene, Alice’s “immense length of neck” assumes the form of a fuzzy tree trunk, capped with an almost Pre-Raphaelite face, which gazes solemnly across the distant forest below. It's an oddly mournful countenance that recurs throughout. On the final page Carroll stuck a small photographic portrait of Alice Liddell (1852–1934) the family friend for whom he wrote (and drew) the story. Underneath the photograph is his attempt at a drawn portrait, with which he seems to have been displeased enough to cover with the photograph. Did he intend his heroine to look like Alice herself? It's not so easy to tell, though there is something of her look in his drawings. The manuscript was presented to Alice so that she could revisit a story that he had improvised while rowing her and her sisters down one of Oxford’s rivers. As Carroll put it: Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream. . .and many a fairy tale had been extemporized for their benefit. . .yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its golden afternoon. . . While unsubstantiated theories about the author’s consumption of hallucinogenic compounds or undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy are often trotted out as an explanation for the fictional Alice’s phantasmagoric adventure, the other-worldly pleasures of these idle river trips seem to be a more likely source for the unparalleled visions of Wonderland. As Walter de la Mare observed, when writing about Carroll, “afternoons in July, if fair and cloudless, are apt to be narcotics. The rhythm of sculling quiets the mind and sets the workaday wits drowsing”. In addition to his clerical and mathematical pursuits, Carroll was as much a visual artist as a storywriter. In 1899, there was enough unpublished material for his nephew, Stuart Carroll Collingwood, to publish The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, a collection of lesser-known texts, many complete with illustrated margins, alike in kind to “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”. Carroll was also a talented photographer, keeping a darkroom in his College rooms. As Diane Waggoner has argued, “Carroll’s photographs of children equaled the status of his children’s books. His pictures served as a vehicle for the emotional and imaginative appeal of. . . childhood”. A similar set of concerns and proclivities can be glimpsed in his original Alice illustrations, which capture both the playful innocence and unselfconscious sincerity of childhood adventure. When Carroll decided to publish his story, excising certain family-specific details from “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”, he chose John Tenniel (1820–1914) as illustrator, well-known for his cartoons in the magazine Punch. Tenniel based several of his drawings, engraved onto woodblock electrotypes by the Dalziel brothers, off of Carroll’s own illustrations, but found the Oxford Don to be rather exacting with his interventions. Some of this scrupulousness was warranted: Tenniel introduced several interpretive ambiguities into his illustrations, few of which escaped Carroll’s notice, or his time-consuming calls for correction. And, after working on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tenniel initially declined to illustrate Through the Looking-Glass (1871), which scholars have read as a sign that the collaboration between author and illustrator had temporarily soured. Below you can browse all thirty-seven of Carroll’s manuscript illustrations, which carry bittersweet associations. On one hand, it is a joy that they have survived. It was treasured by Alice Liddell until she was forced to auction the text in 1928 to pay for her husband’s death duties. Thankfully, it was eventually purchased, after passing through the possession of several intermediary owners, by American benefactors, who donated the manuscript to the British Library as a symbol of a special, postwar relationship between the nations in 1948. On the other hand, these illustrations conjure an unfathomable depth of creative loss when we remember that the Alice stories were just a few of the many “original, funny, starling, and brilliant” tales that Carroll extemporized for children, most of which were never transcribed or drawn at all, only given over to the wind and river on idle summer afternoons.

public-domain-review

Jun 22, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:56.227948

martin-gerlach-festons

Festooned: Martin Gerlach’s Decorative Groupings (1897) Text by Hunter Dukes Aug 5, 2021 A prolific engraver and photographer, Martin Gerlach (1846–1918) made his name by founding an eponymous publishing company in Berlin. After relocating to Vienna, he launched a series of children’s books, Jugendbücherei, which featured illustrations by Carl Otto Czeschka, Gustav Klimt, Franz Wacik, and other artists, many in vogue or soon to be. Eventually starting the Polygraphic Art Institute with Ferdinand Shenk, Gerlach passed on his business and artistic legacy to his son, also named Martin Gerlach (1879–1944), who adopted a surrealist approach to photography. Below you will find a set of images from one of the lesser-known works by Gerlach (senior), Festons und Decorative Gruppen aus Pflanzen und Thieren (Festoons and Decorative Groups of Plants and Animals), originally published in 1893. It is a quintessential “book of examples”, a reference manual meant for inspiring artists and artisans designing plaster, textile, wallpaper, and wood, with an aesthetic adjacent to Art Nouveau. Similar to Karl Blossfeldt’s experiments with magnified photography, Gerlach’s collotype images arrange natural elements with such precision as to make them seem almost artificial. They anticipate, to an uncanny degree, the modernist boxes of Joseph Cornell, where paper cut-out parrots live in palimpsestuous ecosystems of color, pattern, and text. And yet, Gerlach’s festoons, swags, and friezes feel less like dioramas or mixed-media collages and more like fantastical worlds frozen in place. Part of the brilliancy, here, comes from the use of borders and frames, which look like Instagram layouts circa 1895. Orchids almost writhe in front of a cornsilk-colored panel. Crayfish crisscross cattails, arranged in rings with the circumference of a serving platter. And a cockatoo gets spotlit in the negative, cocking its head over leaves of Monstera deliciosa. Each image is positively baroque, but never overwhelming. These still lives are exactly that: still lives — quiet scenes lifted from the decomposing stream of time. There’s a winking suggestion throughout that the flora and fauna might awake from their collotype fixity and bloom into full saturation once again. You can browse our highlights from the third (and final) 1897 edition of Gerlach’s Festons und Decorative Gruppen, held by the Rijksmuseum, below. The 1893 edition can be viewed here.

public-domain-review

Aug 5, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:56.711306

william-blakes-the-gates-of-paradise

William Blake’s The Gates of Paradise (1787-93) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 21, 2021 “In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity”, writes Peter Ackroyd in his biography of William Blake. What holds true for this prophetic poet’s collected works also appears in miniature within The Gates of Paradise. Babies lay dormant, cocooned and buried, while an elderly man enters the dark behind death’s door. But there is no clear order. The old man may well discover that his threshold leads back into the earth, from which he will emerge as a child again. Blake drew The Gates of Paradise during a visionary period, an intensification of the eidetic images that he had seen throughout his life. He experienced specters of the dead rising up before him — kings, friends, and angels — and found it difficult to complete the commercial illustrations that he had been hired to engrave. Instead, Blake turned inward. Beginning in 1787, he drew a series of sixty-four images over six years, and eventually etched seventeen of these onto copper plates. Originally released with a subtitle of For Children (the version featured in this post), Blake later redesigned the series as For the Sexes. In one sketch of a title page never realized, the poet shifts into a darker register, renaming the series For Children: The Gates of Hell. Similar poles — between heaven and hell, childhood and maturity — would form the bounds of his well-known diptych, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789). Unlike Blake’s most famous engravings, which interlace text and image, the visual dimension dominates across The Gates of Paradise. Here we can see Blake’s interest in “emblem literature” — sixteenth and seventeenth century books that link an allegorical symbol to an epigram or motto, such as Francis Quarles’ Emblems (1635), George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635), and Devises et Emblemes Anciennes & Modernes (1699). The reputation of this format has suffered from its bludgeoning moral quality, which one scholar describes as a genre that never escapes mediocrity and doubles down on the banal. But Blake makes a sometimes tiresome tradition strange once again. While they touch upon Christian themes, The Gates of Paradise are shocking for their scenes of vibrant ecology, human figures mixed and remixed with the earth. In an image coupled with the phrase “I found him beneath a Tree”, a female figure yanks smiling children up from the ground, like unrooting carrots, recalling folklore related to the mandrake: how its screams signal a hellish fate for whomever harvests the root. Paired with the caption “What is Man!”, a caterpillar gazes on a leaf-bound larva with the face of a child, summoning Blake’s proverb in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priests lays his curse on the fairest joys”. Elsewhere: angels emerge from avian eggs; a pining figure follows his desire up a ladder, away from the world. Even the elements themselves are embodied. “Earth” is a squat man entombed alive and “Air” becomes a body lacking enclosure, a preoccupation across Blake’s The First Book of Urizen (1794). Most disturbing is a figure similar to God the Father, whom Blake was wont to call Nobodaddy. Here the anthropomorphized deity resembles Saturn, maiming his angels by clipping their wings (“Aged Ignorance”) and staring almost directly into our gaze alongside the question, “Does thy God O Priest take such vengeance as this?” If “the mystic sought union with God”, writes Helen C. White, “Blake sought a restoration of the soul to the life of vision.” Profoundly religious, Blake nevertheless eschewed the fetters of church and dogma, chartering a unique course toward his paradisiacal gates. As Matthew Hargraves recounts, Blake, near death, explained how “his physical body might be ‘feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in the Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever.’”

public-domain-review

Apr 21, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:57.028456

watson-and-the-shark

John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) Text by Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes Jul 20, 2021 It’s too late to save the leg, which has been bitten off below the knee. But Brook Watson, the floating blonde youth depicted in Copley’s oil painting, will be rescued from the jaws of this tiger shark and go on to enjoy a long life as a London merchant, becoming Lord Mayor in 1796 and a baronet in 1803. His rise bred envy: “in spite of his later elevation”, wrote one of Copley’s detractors, “there are those whose sympathy is with the shark”. Though based on true events, we view this work from the distant vantage of its artist’s imagination: Copley had never visited Cuba, the backdrop of his fearful tableau. Born in Boston in 1738, he enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist — with sitters including the likes of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams — gaining international fame for a study of his half-brother Henry Pelham, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Although Copley’s sitters and social circle included people from both sides of the political divide, as tensions mounted in the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, the artist found himself liable through marriage. His father-in law, Richard Clarke, was one of the Tory merchants whose product had been destroyed during the Boston Tea Party. When a group of independence-seeking Whigs threatened Copley, he set off abroad. With this change of scenery came a change in style, as Copley, influenced by a Grand Tour of the continent, began to depict not just individuals but dramatic and historic landscapes. In Watson and the Shark, he reanimates an adventure that occurred in the waters around Havana, when the artist was just eleven years old. As the cabin boy Watson went for a swim, he was ambushed by sharks. The crew members fended off a third assault and dragged the boy (now missing his right leg) back aboard. Although it was a somewhat recent development in historical painting to portray contemporary events rather than biblical, classical, or military scenes, Watson and the Shark in many ways belongs to a longer aesthetic lineage. Several scholars have traced the debts that Copley owes to previous artworks, in terms of composition, anatomy, and metaphorical import. Watson has a similar body and posture (though rotated and semi-submerged) to the Borghese Gladiator (from the third century BCE), while his profile repeats that of Laocoön from the same era (Monique Webber discusses this statue in a PDR essay from 2016). Ellen G. Miles suggests the influence of earlier works such as Raphael’s George and the Dragon on Copley’s triangular composition and notices the influence that Charles Le Brun’s investigations into facial expression exert on the sailors’ painted visages. One of the more prominent figures is the Black sailor who watches over the violent scene. Copley’s first sketches of the composition included a different, white figure, but for the final painting, he included this man, who appeared elsewhere in a standalone portrait by Copley, but whose identity remains unknown. The historian Louis P. Masur called this sailor “one of the most important representations of a black person in all of eighteenth-century Western art”. Many have pointed to the almost umbilical affinity between the distressed Watson and the cryptic sailor, who stands above the chaos and holds the rope that crosses Watson’s arm and seems to join his flowing blonde hair. Several other critics, including Michelle Wallace, Albert Boime, and Alan Rice, draw attention to the numerous descriptions in travel anthologies during the Atlantic slave trade of corpses being thrown to sharks. While Watson will be saved and is here rendered as a figure of resurrection (nude, bathed in light), so many others were never rescued from these waters.

public-domain-review

Jul 20, 2021

Melissa McCarthy and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:57.654579

martian-canal-maps

Alien Aqueducts: The Maps of Martian Canals Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 8, 2021 Long before David Bowie asked if there was life on Mars, a wealthy American astronomer arrived on a clear-cut answer: yes, and it built canals. The groundwork for this theory was laid in 1877, when Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping the planet's surface from the Brera Observatory in Milan, where he served as director. Thanks to a slight abnormality in the Merz refractor telescope installed three years earlier, known as overcorrected chromatic aberration, his equipment was unintentionally calibrated for viewing the Red Planet. And then the stars, as it were, further aligned: he timed his observation with a biannual cosmic pattern, an event known as opposition, when Mars moves closest to the Earth. Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately --- shapes that resembled dim lines, crisscrossing the extraterrestrial desert. Despite being colorblind, there was no question of the observer's integrity. Like the telescope, Schiaparelli had honed his body to be a superior astronomical instrument. He abstained from "everything which could affect the nervous system, from narcotics to alcohol, and especially from the abuse of coffee, which [he] found to be exceedingly prejudicial to the accuracy of observation." With clear eyes, Schiaparelli saw intoxicating landscapes and named the linear features canali: a word that, in Italian, can stand for both natural, geological trenches and manufactured channels. Other notable astronomers, such as Henri Joseph Perrotin and Louis Thollon, soon saw them too. Historians offer different theories for what happened next. Some think alien life was found in translation, as, unlike canali, the English "canals" primarily conjures trenches dug by intelligent life. Others credit the recent completion of the Suez Canal (in 1869) for priming the popular imagination with canaliform desires. And still others believe that it is a question of Gestalt psychology, with Mars serving as an interplanetary Rorschach test on which to project one of our species' oldest questions: are we truly alone? Schiaparelli's research was championed by one astronomer in particular: Percival Lowell, brother of the Imagist poet Amy Lowell. A polymath and Boston Brahmin, as labelled by his biographer David Strauss, Lowell led the kind of life only possible for a certain class of individual in the nineteenth century. He spent his thirties in East Asia, writing books with titles like The Soul of the Far East (1888) and Occult Japan (1895), which includes a chapter on demonic possession, and served as Foreign Secretary for the first Korean delegation to visit the United States. Not everyone approved of Lowell's roving, intellectual or otherwise. "Poor Percy," the philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardener once remarked, "[h]e takes a great interest in everything. . . but there is always something pathetic about him. . . his pleasant things always seem to fall flat." In 1893, the bachelor Japanist returned to America and turned his attention from demons to angels: traces of life in the night sky. To assist his new hobby, Lowell bought himself equipment: an observatory built from scratch in Flagstaff, Arizona. He soon released a trilogy of studies: Mars (1895); Mars and its Canals (1906); and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). His thesis? Simple: Schiaparelli's canals were actually the irrigation channels of an advanced civilization that funneled water from its polar caps in accordance with seasonal demand and a changing climate. Weirder still, the Martian canals were not able to be reliably observed (William Henry Pickering, one of the assistants in Flagstaff, could not see the channels, despite looking through the same equipment where they materialized for Lowell and Andrew Ellicott Douglass). There is some evidence that the whole affair was a collective hallucination, arising from an error built into human pattern recognition. As Klaus Hentschel details, when a group of Cambridge schoolboys were shown drawings of Martian topography without canals, and asked to duplicate the images, their sketches often inserted thin lines where there were previously none. Despite blundering on the global stage, Lowell's observatory went on to search for proof of the mysterious Planet X, thought to orbit beyond Neptune. The dwarf planet Pluto now bears his initials in its name. And although he did not discover alien infrastructure, Lowell built another kind of foundation: neither H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds nor Orson Welles' radio adaptation (and the popular delusion it inspired) would have been possible without Lowell's original Martian fever. ※※Indexed under…MarsCanals ofX (letter)to signify the unknown

public-domain-review

Jun 8, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:58.106071

zodiac-man

The Zodiac Man Text by Hunter Dukes May 25, 2021 If you read the broadsheets, tabloids, or periodicals, you may have noticed a recent trend. “Why are Millennials So Into Astrology?” asked the bewildered Atlantic in 2018. The Guardian found the issue compelling enough to publish two different articles on the subject three days apart. A year later, the New Yorker featured an exposé on “millennials who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science”. And the New York Post wrote that “millennials are flocking to astrology”, failing to note its own horoscope section. Even the Financial Times could not help commenting on stargazing’s “strange rebirth”. Humans often look to the stars in times of uncertainty. And the stars — in a tradition of illustrations known as Homo signorum, or, more popularly, the zodiac man — have exerted a strange pull on the human form. In this genre of images, artists feature zodiac symbols alongside or atop the parts of the body they were thought to influence — sometimes even pictured as being attached by ropes. In one version (pictured above), from a fifteenth-century English folding almanac written in Latin, we see a Christ-like figure overcome by animal and allegorical signs. He stands on the fish of Pisces, the crab of Cancer scuttles up his chest, and Gemini twins weigh down the arms. In place of a halo, the goat and bull (Capricorn and Taurus) float above his head with dopey expressions. These images were, in most cases, didactic. Surgery had to be timed for when the stars were well-aligned, or, at least, not in opposition to the body part undergoing treatment. To alleviate headaches in seventeenth-century England, for instance, bloodletting was avoided “when the moon was in Aries, since this sign governed the head and face”, writes Katherine Foxhall. Below you will find a table of correspondences between body parts and astrological positions, courtesy of Harry Robin’s The Scientific Image: From Cave to Computer: ARIES: head, eyes, adrenals, blood pressureTAURUS: neck, throat, shoulders, earsGEMINI: lungs, nerves, arms, heads, fingersCANCER: chest wall, breasts, some body fluidsLEO: heart, spine, upper back, spleenVIRGO: abdomen, intestines, gallbladder, pancreas, liverLIBRA: lower back, hips, kidneys, endocrinesSCORPIO: reproductive organs, pelvis, urinary bladder, rectumSAGITTARIUS: thighs, legsCAPRICORN: knees, bones, skinAQUARIUS: ankles, blood vesselsPISCES: feet, some bodily fluid Unlike many ancient and early modern esoteric practices, it is difficult to delimit the zodiac man to a specific region, religion, or civilization. We find similar images in manuscripts from Persia, where the signs appear as if swimming through the zodiac man’s bloodstream, and collected in Antiquities of Mexico (1831) — the Viscount of Kingsborough Edward King’s facsimile of artefacts from the indigenous peoples of the Americas — whom he believed to be a lost tribe of Israel. In a plate from this volume, Nahuatl zodiac signs (cozcacuauhtli, the vulture, and tecpatl, flint or an obsidian knife, for instance) appear like kites strung to the zodiac man’s eye, toes, mouth, and chest. And coatl, the serpent, slithers menacingly toward his genitals. In Europe, images of the zodiac man formed part of a larger medieval episteme or constellation of knowledge. Humans were microcosms, whose health was influenced by the motion of celestial spheres, an idea that found analogues in Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Vedic, Mayan, and Aztec cosmologies. In a subgenre of zodiac man images, he is enclosed in an egg-like shell, encircled by astrological creatures. The zodiac man was a reflection of his firmament. For more on the zodiac man, you can read Lawrence Parmly Brown’s comparative history on the subject from 1921 and browse the examples below.

public-domain-review

May 25, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:58.619778

treatise-on-artificial-limbs

A Treatise on Artificial Limbs (1899) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 7, 2021 Published at the century’s turn, George Edwin Marks’ treatise on prosthesis sought total knowledge. Not merely a history of artificial limbs, it spans more than five hundred pages, containing eight hundred illustrations. “An effort has been made to parallel every possible case of amputation”, begins the Preface, so that “[a]ny person who is maimed in leg, arm, foot, or hand will be able to find a case almost identical with his own”. Due to the injuries incurred during the Napoleonic Wars and the U.S. Civil War — and subsequent cultural representations and (often perverse) public fascination regarding amputees in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture — this Treatise bookends a period of maximum need and increased visibility. Marks begins his historical treatment close to home: describing the genius of his relatives, the American brothers D. B. and A. A. Marks, who patented an artificial leg in 1854. Though business was initially slow — causing brother D. B. to hang up his limb-making hat — soon A. A.’s genius modernized the field, which, until the mid-nineteenth century, “was but the relic of the sixteenth and seventeenth century”, claims Marks, referring to the lasting influence of Ambroise Paré and Pieter Verduyn. The key to this prosthetic revolution, as we eventually learn, involved mechanical advancements in adjustable articulation. But first, history. We are led on a breathless tour of classical prosthesis — see Herodotus on the wood-footed Elean, “avowed enemy of the Lacedemonians”, for example, or Pliny on M. Sergius, the general who ruled with an iron fist. Mere paragraphs later, Marks arrives in the 1800s, during the introduction of so-called Cork Legs, which hold “a comely and approximately natural shape” when compared to “the primitive peg leg”. Marks is quick to demonstrate his expertise: cork was never actually used to any considerable extent, being too “friable and insufficiently resistant”. This does not stop the author from delving into literary history — he cites the anonymous “Song of the Cork Leg” and Thomas Hood’s unfortunate couplet, which addresses a Countess by rhyming stump and plump. Soon A. A. Marks made an international impact. The Japanese Embassy visited his New York factory and the doctor Kawasaki accepted a gift with “great pleasure and many thanks” — one of Marks’ most beautiful models. But Marks had stiff competition abroad: the Count de Beaufort’s inflexible wooden leg had captured the European market. In an effort to improve upon his model and absorb the lumbery shock, Marks (the leg maker) added a rubber foot, which did more to lessen the sufferings of amputees than “any discovery the world has seen”. If George Marks’ pamphlet is beginning to sound like propaganda for the family business, it might be forgiven due to the scope of its author’s empathy, however economically minded. His prosthetic history transforms into a sociological study of class — as Marks, sounding more like Marx, describes the asymmetrical precarity of industrialism — and then again into a medical discussion of “fit”, illustrating myriad prosthetic solutions for various kinds of bodies. While undoubtedly well-intentioned, [scholars of disability such as Katherine Ott](https://books.google.fi/books?id=cJm2qZw3CdAC&lpg=PP1&dq=history of prosthesis marks&pg=PP3#v=onepage&q&f=false) point out that manuals like these played into a wider cultural desire “to make the everyday into something exotic”. And the focus is always on the “maimed”, structured by pity and stories of loss, never on congenital difference. One gets the sense, three hundred or so pages into the treatise, that Marks is almost modernist in his ambition and genre. Like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the Treatise seeks the universal in individual experience, with its seemingly endless considerations of specific trades (train conductor, farmer, house doctor, amanuensis) and the tailored physical requirements of work. Marks ends his text with the epistolary voices of those who benefited most from prosthesis. Hundreds of letters, dated and signed, are reproduced across scores of pages, testifying to the life-changing effects of artificial limbs.

public-domain-review

Sep 7, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:59.066329

visualizing-history-the-polish-system

Visualizing History: The Polish System Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green May 5, 2021 How does one visualize history and chart time? Is it a line, moving forever outward in one direction? A Grecian temple, as Emma Willard envisioned, with Ionic columns representing centuries, receding from view toward a vanishing point at the world’s origin? Or could it be a corkscrew ascending upward, allowing us to look down from our present position into past events similar to our own? For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid — or at least it was for the purposes of remembering it. The so-called “Polish System” originated in the 1820s and was later brought to public attention in the 1830s and 1840s by General Józef Bem, a military engineer with a penchant for mnemonics. As Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg catalogue in their Cartographies of Time, the nineteenth century brimmed with new methods and technologies for committing historical information to memory — and Jażwiński’s contribution (and its later adaptations) proved one of the most popular. The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard. In addition to the colored grid, Jażwiński also explored other ways of making events easy to remember within the gridded matrix. One of the most striking of these was the idea of “chronological constellations”, laid out in part two of his Méthode polonaise (1835). Here historical events marked in the grid would become guiding points within a larger shape, as stars function in a heavenly constellation — “sometimes it's a chair, a sickle, a boat, a letter of the alphabet, etc.” From Poland, Jażwiński’s system moved westward. In the 1830s, for instance, it became an official pedagogical tool for teaching history across France. By the 1850s, a revised and improved version preoccupied educators in the United States and Canada. Here the chart was imagined to be a technology of almost limitless potential. As Nelson Loverin wrote, in his grandly-titled Loverin’s Chart of Time (1882), the Polish System’s “centograph” allowed the student to “[c]ultivate the memory by using the eyes, and their nerves of induction as feeders of the grand optic centres, the reservoirs of the mind”. The North American variation was popularized due to the efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who opened the first English-language kindergarten, and shared a Transcendentalist philosophical outlook with her brothers-in-law Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It seems Peabody revised the original system in 1850 with the publication of her The Polish-American System of Chronology. To increase granularity, her chart further divides up the (previously) smallest unit into a 3x3 grid, which offered the opportunity to indicate the nature of the remembered historical event — spatializing the births and deaths of people, nations, and technologies. For Peabody, temporal grids were more than geometric memory palaces; they had the potential to “lay the foundations of historical knowledge in the minds of the young”. In the age of digital databases, where historical dates are offered up by search engines with a quick tap of the thumb, this might seem like a quaint and antiquated ambition. But the stakes of forgetting are palpable in Peabody’s text. Chronological knowledge is a gateway to democratic power, she believed, recalling “the time, within the memory of our living parents, when the boundaries of nations, and their relations in space to each other, were known only to the few cultivated persons who had sufficient activity of imagination to picture them out by means of descriptions in words”. The Polish System fixed this: no longer did a student have to create a picture of the world out of words — now global history could unfurl on a grid before their eager eyes.

public-domain-review

May 5, 2021

Hunter Dukes and Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:59.575337

edward-quin-historical-atlas

Clouds of Unknowing: Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas (1830) Text by Hunter Dukes May 27, 2021 "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps", says the seafaring raconteur Charles Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). "At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'" Of course, these "blank spaces" were anything but. The no-man's-lands that colonial explorers like Marlow found most inviting (the Congo River basin, Tasmania, the Andaman Islands) were, in fact, richly populated, and faced devastating consequences in the name of imperial expansion. In the same troublesome vein as Marlow, Edward Quin's Historical Atlas painted cartographic knowledge as a candle coruscating against the void of ignorance, represented in his unique vision by a broiling mass of black cloud. Each map represents the bounds of geographical learning at a particular point in history, from a specific civilizational perspective, beginning with Eden, circa "B.C. 2348". In the next map titled "B.C. 1491. The Exodus of the Israelites", Armenia, Assyria, Arabia, Aram, and Egypt form an island of light, pushing back the black clouds of unknowing. As history progresses — through various Roman dynasties, the reign of Charlemagne, and the Crusades — the foul weather retreats further. In the map titled "A.D. 1498. The Discovery of America", the transatlantic exploits of the so-called Age of Discovery force Quin to employ a shift in scale — the luminescence of his globe now extends to include Africa and most of Asia, but North America hides behind cumulus clouds, with its “unnamed” eastern shores peeking out from beneath a storm of oblivion. In the Atlas' last map, we find a world without darkness, not a trace of cloud. Instead, unexplored territories stretch out in the pale brown of vellum parchment, demarcating "barbarous and uncivilized countries", as if the hinterlands of Africa and Canada are awaiting colonial inscription. Not much is known about Edward Quin, the Oxford graduate, London barrister, and amateur cartographer whose Atlas was published two years after his death at the age of thirty-four. We learn, thanks to Walter Goffart's research into historical atlases, that Quin's images were more popular than his words. The well-regarded cartographer William Hughes rescaled the maps for a new edition in 1846, discarding their artist's accompanying text. The Atlas' enduring technical advancement, which influenced subsequent cartographers, can be found in its ingenious use of negative space. Emma Willard's Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History, for instance, features cloudy borders that seem very much indebted to Quin. Looking back from a contemporary vantage, the Historical Atlas remains memorable for what is not shown. Quin's cartography inadvertently visualizes the ideology of empire: a geographic chauvinism that had little respect for the knowledge of those beyond imperial borders. And aside from depicting the reach of Kublai Khan, his focus remains narrowly European and Judeo-Christian. While Quin strives for accuracy, he admits to programmatic omission. "The colours we have used being generally meant to point out and distinguish one state or empire from another. . . were obviously inapplicable to deserts peopled by tribes having no settled form of government, or political existence, or known territorial limits". Instead of representing these groups, Quin, like his clouds, has erased them from view.

public-domain-review

May 27, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:59.901271

alphonse-allais-april-fools-album

Figure/Ground: Alphonse Allais’ April Fools Album (1897) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 9, 2021 Alphonse Allais (1854–1905) “was probably the finest humorous writer France has ever produced”, writes the translator Miles Kingston in a forward to the recent collected edition of his work, but remains “an almost totally obscure figure” in the English-speaking world. This is puzzling because Allais’ innovations are manifold. They range from the impressive though quasi-conventional — becoming editor of the newspaper Le Chat Noir; dabbling in photography and rubber production; inventing a version of Nescafé avant la lettre — to the utterly bizarre. Finding traditional hotel wake-up calls jarring, Allais would arrange for the concierge to phone the guests on either side of his room, rising at dawn to the muffled sounds of his neighbors’ outrage. A man of many talents, Allais’ series of paintings, collected in the monograph Album primo-avrilesque (roughly translated as An April Fools Album) arose, perversely, from his lack of aptitude in the realm of visual art. Each of the seven monochrome plates, bordered by lace-like decorations, features a title which implies the dissolution of figure into ground. A Campbell’s-soup-red rectangle comes with the title Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea (an effect of Aurora Borealis). A frame filled with nothing but blue, anticipating Yves Klein’s later experimentation, gets explained by an effusive caption: Astonishment of young naval recruits seeing, for the first time, your blue, O Mediterranean Sea! Allais’ white painting, which antecedes Rauschenberg’s modular series by more than fifty years, claims to show anemic girls commuting to their first communion during snowfall. The Album ends with a funeral march. It consists of a blank musical staff, beating John Cage to the punch, perhaps meant to be “played” alongside another Allais invention: a hearse whose coffin compartment contains a cremator. In the Album, we witness Allais’ humor assume a register that is more than merely off-color. The funeral march appears below a dedication — for “a great deaf man” — insisting that ableist prejudice follows one beyond the grave. His black plate comes with the title Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit (Negroes fighting in a cellar, at night). As the art historian Rebecca Zorach notes, the joke sabotages the series’ conceit of representation. If there is no light in the supposed cave, why would skin color even matter? Unlike most of the other figures in the series. . . the African bodies of the black painting are socially undifferentiated. They don’t, apparently, wear clothes, they don’t interact with objects, they do nothing but fight with one another, in the dark, and *of* the dark. They simply *are* their bodies, unseeable and unknowable. The reduction to darkness, not just the antiquated nomenclature of “negroes,” which could pass in some other circumstance, cements the racism of the phrase. Allais’ preface offers little in the way of critical distance, imploring his readers to let the work speak equally for both itself and himself. Yet the joke was not, in fact, Allais’ own (though he later claimed it as such), but an imitation of poet Paul Bilhaud’s “painting”, produced for the Salon des Incohérents. This proto-Dadaist exhibit responded to the critique — widespread in 1890s France — that modern artists could not paint. Gathering a group of artists who, in fact, could not paint, the Hydropathe Jules Lévy held this salon in his Left Bank apartment. Thousands were said to have attended the exhibition, including Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Wagner, and a Bavarian king. Set within a wider history of the representation of Black bodies in Western art, Bilhaud and Allais’ gag is not unique in its reduction of subjects to monochrome colors. Tanya Sheehan opens her study of photography, race, and humor by discussing a stereocard, produced by the Universal Photo Art Company of Philadelphia, titled A Study in Black and White (1900). Here Black infants are seated amid a mound of cotton that expands beyond the frame. “Since most photographic processes depended on light’s stimulation of silver nitrate to darken, or blacken, the white ground of a photosensitive surface, the medium served as a ready metaphor for racial difference and the ground upon which many jokes about race were laid.” While photographic exposure complicates questions of racial imaging — where, stretching into the contemporary, digital world, optical white balance encodes social narratives about “normal” contrast, even without a “Shirley card” — racism also haunts the artistic tradition closest to this Album: monochromatic painting. In 2015, researchers at Russia’s Tretyakov Gallery discovered an inscription under the topcoat of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). Its contents? Bilhaud and Allais’ joke (though experts differ on the inscriber).

public-domain-review

Sep 9, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:00.381562

orchid-hunter

Albert Millican’s Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter (1891) Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 27, 2021 "I was induced by the cravings of a well-whetted appetite to put aside all scruples of delicacy or custom and discuss the merits of the flesh of the celebrated iguana", writes Albert Millican with typical badinage during his horticultural adventure memoir. If, in today's world, your local florist or hothouse caretaker does not strike you as needing "a stock of knives, cutlasses, revolvers, rifle, [and] an overflowing supply of tobacco" in order to procure carnations and the fixings for bouquets, the nineteenth-century orchid hunter was a very different character. Between 1887 and 1891, Millican made five trips to the orchid-rich areas of South America, concentrating on the Northern Andes. This was an era of orchidelirium, when a single rare specimen could fetch around $25,000 in today's money. Prospectors shipped millions of orchid bulbs to Europe and less than one-percent survived the journey. The reasons for this sudden interest in orchids has several overlapping explanations: the ascension of the modern greenhouse; Darwin's work on the coevolution of insects and orchids; and a wider Victorian fascination with curios collected from around the world. Millican's own story ends in the tenor in which he lived: he was stabbed to death by rivals while pilfering rare flowers. But why orchids? And not other blooming delights: the mammoth Amazonian waterlily, with its three-meter diameter, or the titan arum, whose inflorescence looms over those who approach this plant that smells like rotting meat? "What is intriguing in this tangle of aesthetic enthrallment and unscrupulous trophy hunting", writes Richard Mabey in his book on the botanical imagination, "is the disproportion between the obsessional nature of orchid fancying and the character of the plants." When seeking a source for orchidelirium, Mabey and others have seized upon the longstanding bodily connotations of this delicate plant family that includes more than twenty-five thousand members. The word "orchid", for example, reaches back to the Greek orchis ("testicle"), while the basic shape of most orchids includes a lip or labellum, sometimes divided into lobes, which have been portrayed as legs and other anatomical aspects --- a gendered association that, as Katy Kelleher traces, has a particularly violent history. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and Britain especially, the orchid imaginary went into overdrive, accruing additional senses and secret meanings, thanks to the flower's fleshy qualities, far-flung origins, and delicate beauty, which became evocative touchstones in visual art and literature. In Martin Johnson Heade's painting titled Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871), for example, a light-pink flower appears amid an otherworldly landscape dripping with moss and moisture, framed by a humid sun and the titular birds circling a clutch of eggs. During Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, this same family of flowers becomes a euphemism for sex, when Swann and Odette refer to doing or making "Cattleya". Just this one genus of orchid alone could have a book-length history, as it was "discovered" in England by the merchant and botanist William Cattley, who found the tendrils of C. labiata mixed with other packing materials in a shipment received from Brazil, before being lost for several decades, when its true source location could not be found. Millican's Travels and Adventures plays into this horticultural frenzy, such as when he describes a Colombian grotto where "the trees are literally covered with Cattleya labiata", but the book also inadvertently reveals how orchid hunting both perpetuated and profited from global systems of exploitation and inequality. Millican writes, for instance, about how Cattleya mossiae can now be had with "the greatest ease" in Caracas, "for the Indians bring large quantities of plants into the city for sale at a very nominal price, instead of the poor plant-collector having to brave all the dangers of the forest". If this sounds like a potentially collaborative enterprise, Millican later tips his hand, describing how "the orchid gems" of northern Colombia will remain inaccessible "until the last red man has disappeared from his territory". There was human as well as ecological devastation as a result of this European stockpiling. In order to capture Cattleya mendelii, a flower that adorns the title-page displayed above, Millican cut down over four thousand trees, writing off the clear-cutting as "no serious injury". In his cultural history of orchids, Jim Endersby disagrees: "it is hard to read of such wholesale ecological vandalism without weeping". Elsewhere we catch glimpses of the colonial networks that allowed Millican to circumnavigate the world, such as when he docks near "a coolie station, where the newly-imported East Indiamen find an asylum until their services are in demand for the sugar plantations". There is much to dislike about Millican's rhetoric, irredeemably tarnished by an imperial arrogance and denigratory anxiety regarding other cultures and peoples, which is not useful to quote examples of here. And yet, the book remains worth browsing for how it complicates ephemeral beauty, making us confront the histories hidden in the folds of petals, stigma and stem.

public-domain-review

Jul 27, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:00.851048

visualizing-migraines

Visualizing Migraines: The Attempts of Hubert Airy and Others to Depict Scintillating Scotomata Text by Hunter Dukes May 18, 2021 “Migraine affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all civilisations, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history”, wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks in a 1970 study that arose in response to the common medical sentiment that “little is known about migraine and even less to be done about it”. While a migraine shares some symptoms with the common headache, frequently-experienced visual distortions set it apart from the effects of tension, stress, or dehydration. And yet, despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, its medical observation is relatively recent. As Katherine Foxhall chronicles in Migraine: A History, John Fothergill’s description of a headache he suffered in the winter of 1778 is thought to be the first anglophone account of a migraine’s ocular disturbances. He saw “a singular kind of glimmering in the sight; objects change their apparent position surrounded by luminous angles, like those of a fortification. Giddiness comes on, headache, and sickness”. Fothergill was detailing, with the architectural language of fortification, what has been subsequently named scintillating scotomata: serrated hallucinations in the shape of the letter “C”, which resemble the angular walls of a bastion. Discontent with suffering alone, the physician Hubert Airy set out to draw and share his migraine experiences in 1870. He corresponded frequently with the astronomer John Herschel, who, like Fothergill, found himself overcome, during an otherwise uneventful breakfast, by a debilitating “pattern in straight-lined angular forms, very much in general aspect like the drawing of a fortification, with salient and re-entering angles, bastions and ravelins, with some suspicion of faint lines of colour between the dark lines”. A keen-eyed observer of the outer world, who first coined the term "photography", Herschel's neurological condition forced him to turn this focus inward. While Herschel was convinced that his visions signalled the onset of blindness, Airy believed the patterns he saw during migraine attacks — which his father, George Airy, also prone to scotomata, described as “Norman arches” — revealed something important about the brain. In 1870, Hubert Airy delivered a paper to the Royal Society in Cambridge, which was subsequently published under title “On a distinct form of Transient Hemiopsia”. During an otherwise scientific exposition, Airy inserts a journal entry from 1854, detailing his first migraine attack while still a student. Here we find a description uncannily reminiscent of both Fothergill and Herschel: When it was in its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously. . . All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive. Accompanying the paper, Airy included several plates visualizing the progression of scintillating scotoma. “So why did Airy think that indulging in a recital of his personal experiences was worthy of presentation to the Royal Society?” asks Katherine Foxhall. The answer reveals how technological progress provided medical research with a new set of metaphors. “Because, he concluded, this teichopsia [scintillating scotoma] was more than ‘merely’ a disease. It could be regarded as ‘a veritable “Photograph” of a morbid process going on in the brain.’” Few things remain as unrelenting across history as the pain in our heads. Mervyn J. Eadie tells the story of what some believe to be the earliest surviving description of a headache, recorded by an ancient Babylonian cuneiformist and translated by Reginald Campbell Thompson. Here too, perhaps, we find the “flashing” or scintillating phenomena of a migraine: “Headache roameth in the desert, blowing like the wind / Flashing like lightning, it is loosed above and below”. Thompson also revealed a potential alleviant in his The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903), discovered long before the days of ibuprofen and paracetamol: Take the hair of a virgin kid,Let a wise woman spin (it) on the right side . . . And bind the head of the sick man . . . That the Headache may ascend to heavenLike the smoke of a peaceful homestead In medieval Europe, a similar link persisted between head pain and the heavens, whereby the migraine aura was possibly understood as a divine revelation: the scotoma’s angles taken for angels. When Charles Singer (1876-1960), the British Society for the History of Science’s first president, viewed the medieval manuscript known as Scivias (completed in 1151) — where the mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s visions are illuminated in vibrant, crenulated patterns — he “recognized at once that the figures . . . resembled descriptions by patients of what they had seen during attacks of migraine”. You can browse Airy’s images and a fortification-like illumination depicting Hildegard of Bingen’s visions from the Wiesbaden Codex below, as well as additional visualizations by neurologists William Gowers and Joseph Babinski.

public-domain-review

May 18, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:01.161435

solid-objects

Solid Objects: 16th-Century Geometric and Perspective Drawings Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 8, 2021 This sequence of increasingly complex geometrical figures and perspective drawings — collected in a sixteenth-century watercolor manuscript and preserved at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel — comes with no author's note, editor's preface, or running commentary. We know very little about its origins. All we have are shapes and color, with the occasional totem (eagle, rooster, and even a putto holding something like a pinwheel) dwarfed by the immensity of lines and angles. When compared to other geometric images contemporary to the manuscript, it inhabits a middle ground between the sober studies found in Augustin Hirschovogel's Geometria (1543) and Lorenz Stoer's ethereal geometric landscapes (1567). While the manuscript remains a mystery, certain pages share a strong resemblance to the etchings by Jost Amman for Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) — and one image bears the inscription "Geometria et Perspectiva Corporum Regularium" (Geometry and Perspective of the Regular Bodies), though this was a somewhat common descriptive name for studies of this kind. Indeed, the manuscript displays the German Renaissance fascination for geometrical solids demonstrated by Jamnitzer, Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, and Hans Lencker, which paralleled similar experiments in Italy conducted by Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Leonardo da Vinci, and several others — part of a larger "rise of perspective" in visual art and the renewed mathematical fascination with polyhedra. According to Thomas Christensen, it was thought that one could derive, from geometric solids, "God's secret design for the universe". Without a precis or introduction, we might find ourselves adrift in a world of forms, were it not for the intuitive logic exhibited in the order of these drawings. After the pyramid and cube, we find an icosahedron — a polyhedron with twenty sides, the progressive extrapolation of those earlier shapes. Then a beautiful, ruby-painted variation of the "great dodecahedron", which contains pentagrams in its excavations. And suddenly, compounds: combinations of octahedrons and cubes, faceted and almost stellated in certain instances. As the geometry becomes more complex, the drawings gain worldly details: a spherical surface covered with a triangular mesh is staged on an angular stand, the kind that you might find attached to a globe, situating the abstract realm of mathematical possibility against solid ground. A beautiful example in this regard features a pale-yellow sphere, which has been grooved like a paper lantern or an ornamentally peeled orange. It sits on an irregular jade barrel, stacked on a low pink table. The tower of shapes leans slightly rightwards, lending a profound sense of movement to the otherwise meaningless collection of surfaces. On the left, leg raised, a white wagtail sounds its approving chisick. The concluding pages create a grand finale: lattice spheres; elongated pastel pyramids that resemble someone's dream of an ancient city; two tori, cut, interlinked, and set upon a pedestal, like a surrealist sculpture of donuts hugging; a very unexpected and realistic lute, floating over a lily-padded toad; and then, the manuscript's penultimate perspective drawing — a carmine book, whose cover is inscribed with an abstract shape, opened to show a cross resting on a stand. At this point in the series, steeped in curves and surfaces, the singular Christian symbol summons a sense of geometry both profane and sacred: although many are utterly commonplace, the forms in this manuscript seem to transport us just beyond the realm of comprehension.

public-domain-review

Jul 8, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:01.724285

illustrations-of-ventilation-1869

Illustrations of Ventilation (1869) May 5, 2012 Illustrations showing movement of air through various rooms, from Lectures on Ventilation (1869) by Lewis W. Leeds. The full book can be seen here on Internet Archive.

public-domain-review

May 5, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:02.621411

codex-mendoza-1542

Codex Mendoza (1542) May 14, 2012 The Codex Mendoza is an Aztec codex, created about twenty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the intent that it be seen by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. It contains a history of the Aztec rulers and their conquests, a list of the tribute paid by the conquered, and a description of daily Aztec life, in traditional Aztec pictograms with Spanish explanations and commentary. It is named after Antonio de Mendoza, then the viceroy of New Spain, who may have commissioned it. After creation in Mexico City, it was sent by ship to Spain. The fleet, however, was attacked by French privateers, and the codex, along with the rest of the booty, was taken to France. There it came into the possession of André Thévet, cosmographer to King Henry II of France. Thévet wrote his name in five places on the codex, twice with the date 1553. It was later bought by the Englishman Richard Hakluyt for 20 French francs. Some time after 1616 it was passed to Samuel Purchase, then to his son, and then to John Selden. The codex was deposited into the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1659, 5 years after Selden's death, where it remained in obscurity until 1831, when it was rediscovered by Viscount Kingsborough and brought to the attention of scholars. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 14, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:02.928931

around-the-world-on-the-phonograph-1888

Around the World on the Phonograph (1888) Apr 16, 2012 Thought to be the oldest surviving recording of Thomas Edison's voice, made in October 1888 he describes an imagined trip "around the world on the phonograph," by Cunard steamer from New York City to Liverpool, through Europe and Asia, noting specific ships, railroads, cities, and points of interest en route. In the following decades Edison's phonograph invention would itself spread "around the world".

public-domain-review

Apr 16, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:03.427081

a-floral-fantasy-in-an-old-english-garden-1899

A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden (1899) May 10, 2012 Walter Crane (1845–1915) is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 10, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:03.871846

early-footage-from-space-1963

Early Footage From Space (1963) May 4, 2012 Universal Newsreel showing footage of the launch of a Titan II rocket in 1963 along with images from the unmanned capsule of the first stage being dropped. Beneath the falling debris of the discarded first stage the curvature of the earth is clearly visible: "Through the magic of the camera earthlings take their first ride into space."

public-domain-review

May 4, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:04.365263

geometrical-psychology-or-the-science-of-representation-1887

Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation (1887) Apr 15, 2012 Louisa S. Cook's Geometrical psychology, or, The Science of Representation: An Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts details Benjamin Betts' remarkable attempts to mathematically model human consciousness through geometric forms. From the Introduction: The symbolic forms which Mr. Betts has evolved through his system of Representation resemble, when developed in two dimensions, conventionalised but very scientifically and beautifully conventionalised leaf-outlines. When in more than two dimensions they approximate to the forms of flowers and crystals. .... The fact that he has accidentally portrayed plant-forms when he was studying human evolution is an assurance to Mr. Betts of the fitness of the symbols he has developed, as it affords presumptive evidence that the laws he is studying intuitively admit of universal application. After living in India for a spell, Benjamin Betts, who was educated in England as an architect, obtained a post as “Trigonometrical Computor of the Survey Department” in Auckland, New Zealand’s Civil Service. But he moonlighted as metaphysician, developing a “Science of Representation” based on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s remark, in The Science of Knowledge, that lines and circles might correspond with modes of consciousness. Not everyone understood his ideas, however: Betts wrote a letter to John Ruskin, enclosing his illustrations, who replied with a chastisement: art must be spontaneous. But it was not art that Betts was aiming for and he found a better correspondent in Mary Everest Boole, the self-taught mathematician and wife of the late George Boole. The images featured here both refer to what Cook calls “horn-shaped corolla”, one classified as “Ond” and the other “Onde”, alpha and omega forms of the “animal sense-consciousness which underlies the human or rational sense-consciousness”. The corollas are expanding and open because, according to Cook, this is how Betts thought the ego functions: This progressive qualification of consciousness is represented by the Onde, as the progressive quantification of consciousness is by the Ond. The latter starts from a centre of possibility and extends itself ad infinitum into objectivity. The former starts from an objective circumference absolutely limited for the time being, and qualifies itself subjectively ad infinitum. Thus a complementary form of consciousness is evolved, a form contingent on the evolution of the first form. The Ond may be called the form of the Intellect, and the Onde the form of the Emotion of a rational ego on the sense plane.

public-domain-review

Apr 15, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:04.861775

nehemiah-grew-s-anatomy-of-plants-1680

Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1680) Apr 25, 2012 In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Find out more in Brian Garret's article for The Public Domain Review - "The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew" - which explores how Grew’s pioneering ‘mechanist’ vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy.

public-domain-review

Apr 25, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:05.301390

turtle-anatomy-1821

Turtle Anatomy (1821) May 23, 2012 Images from Anatome Testudinis Europaeae (1819-21) by the German physician and naturalist Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus (1776–1827). Bojanus was born at Bouxwiller in Alsace and studied at Darmstadt and the University of Jena. In 1806 he became professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Vilnius, switching to comparative anatomy in 1824. As well as his anatomy of turtles, he was also the author of several scientific discoveries, including a glandular organ in bivalvular molluscs that is now known as organ of Bojanus, and the aurochs. In 1821, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 23, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:05.778268

dazzle-ships

Dazzle Ships Apr 19, 2012 Dazzle camouflage (also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting) was a military camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. The idea is credited to the artist Norman Wilkinson who was serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve when he had the idea in 1917. After the Allied Navies failed to develop effective means to disguise ships in all weathers, the dazzle technique was employed, not in order to conceal the ship, but rather to make it difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size, speed and direction of travel. After seeing a canon painted in dazzle camouflage trundling through the streets of Paris, Picasso is reported to have taken credit for the innovation which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique.

public-domain-review

Apr 19, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:06.232376

an-apparent-tour-of-the-titanic-1912

An Apparent Tour of the Titanic (1912) Apr 11, 2012 A short film which appears to show the interior and deck of the Titanic only minutes prior to its ill-fated voyage in April 1912. Included in the footage is Captain E.J. Smith apparently inspecting the ship just 10 minutes prior to departure, various deck promenades, and the actual leaving of the ship. We are reliably informed however that it is a sneaky bit of sleight of hand by the newsreel company, splicing together footage from other ships (mostly the Titanic's 'sister' ship The Olympic). Notice the scratched out name plates on the frames which appear as floating white marks in the film.

public-domain-review

Apr 11, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:06.740480

a-burlesque-translation-of-homer-1797

A Burlesque Translation of Homer (1797) Apr 21, 2012 Homer's Iliad set to bawdy verse by Thomas Bridges (c.1710-c.1775), originally published in 1762 under the pseudonym Caustic Barebones. The work achieved some popularity, and was reprinted several times, the last in 1797. In 1765 Bridges wrote The Battle of the Genii, a burlesque of John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was once attributed to Francis Grose. Bridges' only novel was The Adventures of a Bank-Note, published in 1770.

public-domain-review

Apr 21, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:07.235283

rip-van-winkle-1896

Rip Van Winkle (1896) May 12, 2012 The first film adaptation of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", a short story about a man who awakes after a twenty-year-long sleep to a huge white beard on his face and a much changed world. In this footage, Joseph Jefferson, the actor most associated with the character on the nineteenth-century stage, makes a series of short films recreating scenes from his stage adaptation.

public-domain-review

May 12, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:07.681759

how-to-become-a-magician-1882

How to Become a Magician (1882) May 16, 2012 A grand assortment of various tricks, illusions, conjurings, deceptions and slights of hand.... The following pages are not intended to make the young reader either a cheat or a trickster; there is nothing perhaps so utterly contemptible in every-day life as trickery and deceit, and we would caution our young friends not to cultivate a love of deception, which is only allowable in such feats of amusement, because it is in fact not deception at all, when everybody expects to be puzzled, and is only left to find out the mystery the best way he can.

public-domain-review

May 16, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:08.151222

welsh-fairytales-and-other-stories-1894

Welsh Fairytales and Other Stories (1894) Apr 12, 2012 Collection of stories told to the author during his stay in Anglesey during the winter of 1891-2, mostly involving fairies in some form or other, and either the finding or losing of money.

public-domain-review

Apr 12, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:08.568148

farmer-plays-a-song-with-hand-farts-1933

Farmer plays a song with ‘hand-farts’ (1933) Apr 17, 2012 Universal Newsreel from 1933 showing Cecil H. Dill, a farmer from Traverse City, Michigan, demonstrating his ability to render popular melodies by pressing his hands together. After the performance, which seems to be of Yankee Doodle, Dill modestly tells how he discovered his unusual talent while staring rather intensely into the camera.

public-domain-review

Apr 17, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:08.980558

guess-the-celeb-behind-the-driving-garb-1906

Guess the Celeb behind the Driving Garb (1906) May 9, 2012 Images from a 1906 issue of the French women's magazine Femina, the first of it's kind in France and which is still going today. These strange array of pictures are from a competition in which the readers were asked to identify the famous female 'artistes' of the day obscured behind a bizarre variety of women's driving headwear. We at the PDR are not having much luck getting a single one. Can you fare any better?

public-domain-review

May 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:09.393012

dances-in-beauchamp-feuillet-notation

Dances in Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation (1701) Text by Hunter Dukes May 2, 2012 First published in 1701, Choregraphie details an early dance notation system invented in the 1680s at the court of Louis XIV. Four years after the book was published, its author Raoul-Auger Feuillet, maître de danse to the King, found himself subject to a formal complaint by another maître de danse, Pierre Beauchamp, who argued that Feuillet had taken credit for an invention that was in fact his own. Surviving in modified forms into the 1780s, the system is now known as Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. Voltaire ranked the invention as one of the “achievements of his day” and Denis Diderot devoted ten pages to the subject in his Encylopédie. In 1706, the book was translated into English by John Weaver under the title Orchesography, or the Art of Dancing. While earlier dance manuals, such as Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchesographie (1588), separated musical notation, textual description, and gestural illustration, Choregraphie offered a complete system for notating the body in motion. The manual begins with five “true positions” for placing the feet, postures that largely correspond to classical ballet, and five “false positions”. From here we move on to steps, “the different figures the leg makes in moving”. The author recognizes these are “almost innumerable”, but nevertheless can be named: straight plain, open, circular or round, waving, and beaten. On the page, they are inscribed with symbols that look like musical notation writhing to its own rhythm: a waving step forwards resembles an eighth note with a wiggly body; an open step inwards conjures a bass clef arching its back. From steps, we move to marks: sinking, rising, springing, capers, falling, sliding, holding the foot up, pointing the toes, placing the heel, and turning various degrees. These marks add perpendicular lines onto the step’s stem, the way a sixteenth note differs from an eighth by means of its second flag. A deluge of rules and exceptions follow — conventions for changing positions, deciphering the proper order of notation, crossing the legs without finding yourself immobile. And all of these bodily graphemes come together in a beautiful, complex syntax of flowing motion, which intersects musical scores on the page, creating transcriptions of the Sarabande, Canary à deux, Gigue pour homme, and other historical dances. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”, asked W. B. Yeats’ speaker in a 1927 poem. Chorographical notation asks the converse of this question and provides a solution for learning dance at a distance, separate from an instructor’s knowledgeable body. Like all forms of writing, choreography — literally the writing of choral movement — carries the ideologies of its origins. In the case of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, it was designed for courtly bodies, its grammar shaped by the postures of royal taste. And yet, it had sway beyond these halls. As Helen Williams argues, offshoots of the French notation may have helped shape the swirling plotlines of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). And in the first half of the twentieth century, when Rudolf von Laban was formulating his Labanotation system for recording human movement, he attempted to update Beauchamp-Feuillet notation to fit “the context of a modern culture of movement defined by industrial activity, the rise in physical and movement education, and the growth of a psychologically inflected understanding of movement.” Even in the least courtly choreographies, such as Lavinia Schulz’s notation for Four Movements of the Dead Woman (1921), we see a familiar set of strategies arise for tracking a whirling body through space and time. Below you can browse a selection of images from Recueil de dances (1700), exhibiting dances by Feuillet using the notation explained in Choregraphie (1701). A different Recuiel de dances (1700), featuring the choreography of Louis-Guillaume Pécour in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, can be here.

public-domain-review

May 2, 2012

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:09.756544

fortification-theory-1600

Fortification Theory (1600) May 17, 2012 Images from Jean Errard's Fortification Réduicte Art and Démonstrée (Paris, 1600), a seminal work in fortification theory. Errard (1554-1610) was a mathematician by training, and used his love of geometry (he made several translation of Euclid's Elements) to develop a comprehensive theory of military fortifications. He developed a series of geometric designs, based on polygons of various kinds, which were optimised for defence. The most important of his rules stressed the reliance on infantry for defence of a fortress, who, with their potential rapid rate of fire, were better suited than the artillery, which at this period, given its enormous consumption of gunpowder, was only suitable for providing enfilade fire, not engaging in frontal action.

public-domain-review

May 17, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:10.267694

a-farewell-to-arms-1932

A Farewell To Arms (1932) Apr 30, 2012 Film directed by Frank Borzage, and starring a young Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Benjamin Glazer is based on the 1929 semi-autobiographical novel by Ernest Hemingway set during World War 1 about a rebellious ambulance driver who falls in love with a nurse after drunkenly going AWOL.

public-domain-review

Apr 30, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:10.711928

the-practical-magician-and-ventriloquist-s-guide-1876

The Practical Magician and Ventriloquist’s Guide (1876) May 16, 2012 Ex. 1. The Suffocated Victim - This was a favorite illustration of Mr. Love, the polyphonist. A large box or close cupboard is used indiscriminately, as it may be handy. The student will rap or kick the box apparently by accident. The voice will then utter a hoarse and subdued groan, apparently from the boxor closet. Student (pointing to the box with an air of astonishment) : "What is that ? Voice: I won't do so any more. I am nearly dead. Student: Who are you ? How came you there ? Voice: I only wanted to see what was going on. Let meout, do. Student: But I don't know who you are. Voice: Oh yes, you do. Student: Who are you ? Voice: Your old schoolfellow, Tom. You know me. Student: Why, he's in Canada. Voice (sharply): No he aint, he's here; but be quick. Student (opening the lid): Perhaps he's come by the underground railroad ? Hallo ! Voice (not so muffled as described in direction): Now then, give us a hand. Student (closing the lid or door sharply): No, I won't. Voice (as before): Have pity (Tom, or Jack, or Mr_____, as the case may be), or I shall be choked. Student: I don't believe you are what you say. Voice : Why don't you let me out and see before I am dead? Student {opening and shutting the lid or door and varying the voice accordingly): Dead ! not you. When did you leave Canada? Voice: Last week. Oh ? I am choking. Student : Shall I let him out ? {opening the door). There's no one here.

public-domain-review

May 16, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:11.212646

rae-bourbon

Rae Bourbon Apr 23, 2012 During the Pansy Craze of 1930-1933 (mainly in Manhattan), gay clubs and performers, known as "pansy performers", experienced a huge surge in underground popularity. In 1932, Rae Bourbon was working full-time as a female impersonator at such clubs as Jimmy's Back Yard in Hollywood and Tait's in San Francisco. At the latter, in May 1933, police raided his "Boys Will Be Girls" review during a live radio broadcast. In the later 30s and early 40s he headlined at the Rendezvous in Los Angeles and starred in his own revue, "Don't Call Me Madam." Throughout the 50s and 60s Bourbon entertained at hundreds of clubs throughout the U.S. and released dozens of albums, certainly the most prolific female impersonator to have done the latter. His appearances are still fondly remembered by many who saw him when he toured in big and small towns all over the country, providing many isolated Gay men with a glimpse of the loose-knit urban Gay community of the pre-Stonewall era. His comedy was at once highbrow and lowbrow, overtly gay and covertly subversive. Despite his influence on gays, he remained vague about his own sexuality. There is evidence that he had relationships with both men and women, was married twice, and fathered at least one son. Bourbon excelled at generating numerous conflicting stories about himself. (From Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Apr 23, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:11.694446

freedom-highway-1956

Freedom Highway (1956) May 22, 2012 In this film from the Prelinger Archives, a Greyhound bus rides from San Francisco to Washington D.C, transporting us at the same time through the landscape of American mythology (and unwavering patriotism). The cast of bus riders include: Fred Schroder who, embittered by the death of his son in Korea, is riding to Washington to accept a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor on the son's behalf; Jimmy Rollins, a Scout, heading to Washington for his first Jamboree; Mary (a young Angie Dickinson) and Bill Roberts, a basketball star on the make; actor and country star Tex Ritter, playing himself, taking a short ride on the bus as it passes through Texas, singing about the Alamo and the "freedom road."; and most importantly, a black-suited mysterious stranger who appears, as if from nowhere, to transform the outlook of the passengers. Greyhound Lines and America have never looked so good. Winner of the Freedoms Foundation Special Award.

public-domain-review

May 22, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:12.151522

the-memoirs-of-count-boruwlaski-1820

The Memoirs of Count Boruwlaski (1820) May 7, 2012 Józef Boruwłaski (1739–1837) was a Polish-born dwarf who toured in European and Turkish courts. Although not a nobleman by birth (the Count in his name did not refer to a real title), when Boruwlaski was fifteen and 64 cm (25 inches) tall he was adopted into the Eastern European aristocracy and taken into the care of Countess Humiecka. With the Countess he toured the homes of Europe's elite including Empress Maria Theresa and the ex-King of Poland. In 1960 he travelled with the Countess to Paris where he frequented the court in various masked balls and pageants, reportedly impressing the ladies greatly, and entertaining crowds with his guitar playing. When Stanisław II acceded to the throne of Poland, he took Boruwlaski under his protection. When Boruwlaski fell in love with the Countess' new companion, Isalina Barbutan, the countess threw him out but the King interceded on his behalf, gave him a small allowance and a coach to travel in, and with the royal backing he married Isalina. At first, Isalina, the child of a French couple who had settled in Poland, was reluctant to marry Joseph, but he bombarded her with love-letters and won her heart. At the age of 25, Boruwlaski stood 89 cm (35 inches tall), and five years later, measured 99 cm (39 inches), which was to be his final height. After further tours of Austria, Germany, and Turkey, he made his way to England with his wife, where he was presented to George IV and the rest of the royal family. He also met the Irish giant Patrick Cotter and the famously overweight Daniel Lambert. Although he was sometimes able to make a reasonable living from playing the guitar, the problems and expenses of touring sometimes wore Boruwlaski down. Money problems forced Joseph to display himself for money (which he found deeply humiliating) and to bring out three different editions of his autobiography, the last published at Durham in 1820. Eventually, in his advancing years, Boruwlaski accepted an offer to live in Durham, from Thomas Ebdon, organist of Durham cathedral. He died in Durham, on September 5, 1837, at the age of 97. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 7, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:12.639438

aino-folktales-1888

Aino Folktales (1888) Apr 13, 2012 The Ainu (アイヌ?), also called Aynu, Aino (アイノ), and in historical texts Ezo (蝦夷), are a group of indigenous people living in Japan and Russia - thought to originate from the Jōmon-jin people whom many think might have been the first to settle North America. Historically, they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin. A medieval Chinese historian referred to the Ainu region as the "Land of the Hairy Men" on account of the abundance of their facial hair compared to the typical inhabitant of Japan.

public-domain-review

Apr 13, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:13.091889

filippo-morghen-fantastical-visions-of-lunar-life

Filippo Morghen’s Fantastical Visions of Lunar Life (1776) Text by Melissa McCarthy Feb 23, 2021 “Engraver to the King of the Two Sicilies” was the stirring epithet of the eighteenth-century draughtsman, engraver, and print-seller Filippo Morghen. Much of his work concentrated on ruins, the countryside around Naples, and archaeological works such as those at Herculaneum, but his imagination ranged much further, to the extent that in 1776 he produced this fantasy Suite of the Most Notable Things... This collection of ten etchings begins with a title page explaining, in Italian, the conceit: it is The Suite of the Most Notable Things Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon — a form of travel reportage. Scull and Hire, explains the text, have drawn and described their voyage, while Morghen is simply the engraver. This Philippe de La Hire is a historical figure, a French astronomer who lived from 1640 to 1718. Of Scull, nothing is known, and by the second printing the next year he had been replaced by Bishop John Wilkins, a distinguished natural philosopher. In devising such a voyage, Morghen was clearly influenced by scientific progress of the previous century. Writing for Cabinet, Viktoria Tkaczyk describes the development of flying machines during the seventeenth century: Bishop Francis Godwin had his Man in the Moone of 1638 carried there by geese. In the same year, and in a similar speculative vein, was Wilkins' own The Discovery of the World in the Moon. Morghen's explorers mix technological innovation, colonial imagination, and a sense of rococo excess. We see them folding back the roof of their winged, wooden shed and elegantly emerging into a lunar landscape that looks remarkably like contemporary depictions and fantasies of the New World. Over nine further etchings they explore a landscape ripe with not unrealistic wildlife and plants, inhabited by tobacco-smoking, Native American-like residents. But mixed with this is a whimsical, size-altered imaginary world, in which we are never quite sure if the ”lunarians” are extremely small or the natural world around them exceptionally enlarged. Plate 8 depicts snails the size of dogs being fed to an enormous bird, and in several we see “pumpkins used as dwellings”. Yet in plate 9 we see a flock of normal-sized geese, and in plate 2 a normal-sized parrot (watching over the ensnaring of a rodent-like creature the size of a cow). The prints were popular enough to go through at least three editions, and they have occasionally resurfaced during the twentieth century: four of the images were included in MoMA's 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and in 1990 a British small press published a version of the Suite with an introduction by science fiction maestro Brian Aldiss.

public-domain-review

Feb 23, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:13.892668

illustrations-of-the-nervous-system-golgi-and-cajal

Early Illustrations of the Nervous System by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal Jan 28, 2021 Much human behavior has by now been interpreted through the lens of neuroscience. Day after day, news outlets publish articles explaining how researchers have mapped some new part of the central nervous system — further correlating our thoughts, motions, and emotions to various “neural substrates” in our spinal cords and brains. The notion that our whole experience of the world is the result of a lot of little things called “neurons” has become, if not necessarily comprehensible, at least familiar to most of us. Yet neuroscience is a very recent branch of biology. The “neuron doctrine”, which put forward the concept of the nervous system as a composite of discrete individual cells, did not gain traction until the late 1880s. In fact, Camillo Golgi — one of the scientists whose discoveries made the neuron doctrine possible — rejected it and instead clung to the “reticular theory”, which stated that the nervous system’s cells (what we would now call neurons) formed a single network, or reticulum. The idea that living things are composed of cells is itself not yet two hundred years old. Though the English polymath Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and the Dutch businessman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) pioneered the construction and use of microscopes for scientific purposes, it was not until the 1820s that technology improved enough for microscopists to isolate cells. Around the same time, new dyes for staining animal tissue let scientists see that cell bodies (soma) could have only one nerve fibre (axon) but multiple “protoplasmic extensions” (dendrites) which appeared to allow cells to communicate. Due in large part to technological limitations, even researchers with access to the most powerful nineteenth-century microscopes concluded that cells must communicate by fusing together and forming a network: this was the reticular theory that Golgi (1843–1926) brought to bear on his experiments. Born the son of a doctor in a small town in Lombardy, Italy, Golgi studied at the University of Pavia, where he eventually specialized in the etiology of mental disorders. Eager to do research but in need of money, he took a job at a hospital, where, in a makeshift laboratory set up in the kitchen, he developed what he called the “black reaction”. Now known as the Golgi method, it involves immersing tissue specimens in silver nitrate, creating a black deposit on the soma, axon, and dendrites which, once placed under the microscope, become clearly visible against a yellow background. This method made it possible not only to trace the connections between neurons but also to visualize the complex networking structure of the brain and spinal cord. Without the “black reaction”, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) might never have made the discoveries that still inform our understanding of the central nervous system today. Another son of a doctor born in a small town (Petilla de Aragon, in Zaragoza, Spain), Ramón y Cajal was a rebellious child who wanted to be an artist. This was not at all something his father encouraged, and there was a great deal of antipathy between them until, one day, the stern father invited the willful son to help him exhume human remains from local cemeteries. Sketching bones gave Ramón y Cajal a passion for anatomy that propelled him through his university years and medical school in Zaragoza. After a brief, unhappy, malaria-ridden stint as a medical officer for the Spanish army in Cuba, he returned to Spain, where he became a professor — one extremely passionate about the possibilities of modern microscopy. All through the 1880s, Ramón y Cajal set about improving Golgi’s “black reaction”. Cutting thicker sections of tissue, staining more intensely, and using material from birds and young mammals (whose axons were not sheathed in the fatty substance myelin which interfered with the Golgi method), Ramón y Cajal established a more reliable staining procedure that allowed him, as Stanley Finger writes in Minds Behind the Brain, to “study the elements of the nervous system in a systematic way”. Unable to find any scientific journal willing to publish his findings — which, like Golgi’s, included many illustrations — Ramón y Cajal founded a journal of his own. Though by no means rich (and, besides, a father of six), he used his own money to publish it and mailed sixty copies of each issue to anatomists around the world. His most revolutionary finding was the utter lack of evidence for either axons or dendrites fusing and forming networks like those described by Golgi. He observed that, on the contrary, it seemed neurons did not need to touch to communicate. They only had to be contiguous for signals to be transmitted from one to the other. (The term “synapse”, used to describe the structure that permits a neuron to pass on its signal, would not be coined, by Charles Sherrington, until 1897.) In 1906, Golgi and Ramón y Cajal were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and invited to share the stage in Stockholm. “The expectation was”, Finger writes, “that Golgi would talk about the stain that allowed scientists to see neurons better than ever before” and Cajal would “describe the studies that led him to neuron doctrine”. However, as soon as he stepped to the podium, Golgi began attacking the neuron theory (calling it “a fad already going out of favor”). Ramón y Cajal was, understandably, not exactly pleased by this attack on his ideas, but, unlike Golgi, he was gracious. He referred to the older man as his “illustrious colleague” and let time do its work. Below, you can browse a number of Golgi and Ramón y Cajal’s beautiful illustrations of their findings — important depictions of the previously invisible branchings underlying our every thought and gesture. For more of Cajal's wonderful imagery, also check out the 2017 book The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

public-domain-review

Jan 28, 2021

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:14.389764

reverse-of-a-framed-painting

The Reverse of a Framed Painting, and Other Trompe L’oeil by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (ca. 1670) Text by Melissa McCarthy Nov 5, 2020 On Easter Sunday 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys was bowled over by the ability of the Dutch painter Simon Verelst (1644-1710), who took us to his lodging close by, and did shew us a little flower-pot of his doing, the finest thing that ever, I think, I saw in my life; the drops of dew hanging on the leaves, so as I was forced, again and again, to put my finger to it, to feel whether my eyes were deceived or no. He do ask 70l. for it: I had the vanity to bid him 20l.; but a better picture I never saw in my whole life; and it is worth going twenty miles to see it. Around the time Pepys was poking the painting of Verelst, another northern European painter, Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, was also causing confusion with the brush, creating his masterpiece known as The Reverse of a Framed Painting (ca. 1670), an image that is, to modern eyes at least, his most striking. Gijsbrechts was a master of trompe l’oeil, the technique of painting in which the painter tricks the viewer into perceiving that they are looking at an actual three-dimensional scene, rather than merely a representation of a three-dimensional scene on a flat plane. The name trompe l’oeil, or “deceive the eye”, didn’t come into use until Louis-Léopold Boilly showed a painting of this name at the Paris Salon of 1800, but the technique stretches back to antiquity. Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia gives a story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the fifth century BC competing as to who was the greater artist. Zeuxis’ painting of grapes is so realistic that birds swoop down to peck at them, but when Zeuxis follows a request that he should pull back the curtain covering his painting, Parrhasius’ superior skill is unveiled: the curtain itself is the painting, so cleverly rendered that it is indistinguishable from the real. Italian Quattrocento artists, with their interest in perspective, revived trompe l’oeil, and in the seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish artists built on their facility for still lives with further movement towards life-likeness. Gijsbrechts was among their number. Born in Antwerp around 1625, Gijsbrechts criss-crossed northern Europe, eventually dying probably around 1675. He had a son, Franciscus Gijsbrechts, also a painter, with his wife Anna Moons, whom he married in 1648, although by 1659 he enlisted as a member of the Sodality of the Unmarried Men of Age. His biography at RKD, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, traces him from Regensburg, through Hamburg to Copenhagen, where he spent the period from 1668–1672 as a court painter, and where most of his remaining paintings can be found. Most of these, below, are from the collection of Denmark's Statens Museum for Kunst. Gijsbrecht’s trompe l’oeil paintings depict some traditional objects: an impressively luxurious breakfast spread, a letter rack, falconry equipment, or two dead birds. A Cabinet in the Artist’s Studio includes within its selection of artist’s items a portrait that seems to be of Gijsbrecht himself. But it’s his The Reverse of a Framed Painting that is most unusual. SMK Curator Eva de la Fuente Pedersen explains: When viewed from a distance we are genuinely fooled into believing that the artist has left a painting standing on the floor with its back turned outwards. As you approach the painting its deception is revealed. What appeared to be the back of a framed painting is actually the front of a canvas. The deception is evoked by means of shadows: the shadows cast by the decorative frame onto the stretcher; the shadows cast by the stretcher onto the back of the canvas, and the shadows cast by the small note and the nails. In order for the deception to fully work the painting should be placed so that its faux shadows are in keeping with the light sources available in the room in which it is placed. Pedersen supposes that the painting was shown, amidst other playfully deceptive works, in the King’s Perspective Chamber which formed part of the Royal Danish Cabinet of Curiosities around 1700, when Gijsbrechts was in Copenhagen. More than 300 years later it continues to intrigue, striking us as a strangely modern work, in which we could see various prefigurings of later artistic movements. It partakes in, and simultaneously pokes fun at, figurative art. It hints at a fascination with the materiality of painting, the substance as the subject. There’s also something about the use of rectilinear lines to show us the reverse of an image which, albeit accidentally, somehow foreshadows a very modern obsession with the non-representational image (the “non-image”, if you will), as expressed so strikingly in Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and other subsequent abstract works of the twentieth century.

public-domain-review

Nov 5, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:14.907872

an-original-theory-or-new-hypothesis-of-the-universe

Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750) Text by Melissa McCarthy Nov 19, 2020 “I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers”. So admits Thomas Wright in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). Written in the form of nine letters to a nameless friend, the book puts forwards “my Theory of the Universe, and the Ideas I have form’d of the known Creation.” Although he was influenced by Comenius' pansophic theories of universal knowledge from a century earlier, Wright's theory of the heavens was strikingly original. Over the course of his discussions on the views of previous authors (illustrated in plate iii), the position and movement of bodies in the sky, and the implications for time, eternity and the soul, he was “the first to correctly postulate that clusters of starry nebulae were in fact galaxies too distant for us to discern clearly, and that the luminous blur of the Milky Way was simply an optical effect caused by our immersion in it”, as David Braffman explains in the Getty Research Institute blog: see Wright's Plate XXIX for his depiction. This insight into the Via Lactea pre-dated Sir William Herschel and Caroline Herschel’s work in astronomy by two decades, and was an acknowledged influence on Immanuel Kant’s 1755 Universal natural history and theory of the heavens. It took Edwin Hubble’s photographs in the 1920s to offer proof of the nature of the Milky Way, and the telescope named after him continues to expand our fields of knowledge by use of images. Born in County Durham in 1711, Wright became, to use the title of Judy Preston's contextualising paper in Garden History in 2010, a polymath in Arcadia, extremely well-versed in mathematics, sciences, and the arts, as well as an eminent garden designer. He has only one other published book, an introduction to the antiquities of County Louth, Ireland, but his diary, and other papers, are in the Special Collections and Archives at Durham University, where an exhaustive description of his life and works can be found. Not all his ideas were as well-founded as his work on the Via Lactea; in a manuscript sequel to An Original Theory, he proposed “that the sky was solid and studied with inward-pointing volcanoes down whose shafts we see the stars”. The thirty-two “graven and mezzotinto” plates found at the end of An Original Theory — printed “by the Best Masters” and likely based on Wright's drawings — reveal his remarkable range of vision. The most simple images show what Wright has observed in the night sky (Plate XVI), then diagrams of how these constellations (Plate XIX) and comets (Plate IX) are arranged and understood. From his empirical observations, and deductions about what this must mean for the relative positions and orbits (Plate XXII), Wright develops a much more ambitious proposal as to the construction of the universe. Plate XXVII depicts a globe within a globe, part of his hypothesis on the patterns and rules followed by bodies in space. It’s a hypothesis which culminates in his globular visions of the last two plates, which show full and section views of “the Object of that incomprehensible Being, which alone and in himself comprehends and constitutes supreme Perfection”. The extraordinary, endless eyes of the final plate (XXXII) give a good sense of Wright’s cosmic conclusion, that just as the solar system as we observe it is full of complex bodies, so too, but on a larger, parallel scale is the wider universe: an “unlimited plenum of creations”, all centred on the law and vision of God. After a life of scientific discovery, adventure, and a career as a garden designer, Thomas Wright died in 1786. His observations and imaginations of his place in the greater scheme of things appear to have reconciled him to all “those little Difficulties incident to human Nature”. Presented with the immensity, and the visual richness, of space and the heavens, he concluded, “But here, even in this World, are Joys which our Ideas of Heaven can scarce exceed, and if Imperfection appear thus lovely, what must Perfection be”. Featured below, all thirty-two of the illustrative plates, with their relevant description taken from the main body of the book. We've also made a few prints of the images which you can see in our shop here.

public-domain-review

Nov 19, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:15.101092

french-silk-sample-book

French Silk Sample Book (ca. 1900) Text by Melissa McCarthy Feb 16, 2021 First, grow yourself a mulberry tree... could be the first step in a how-to guide for aspiring silk weavers. Then you'd need a silk moth — preferably the Bombyx mori — of which each female will produce a clutch of four hundred or so eggs. From these the hungry silkworms hatch. After six weeks or so of leaf-eating, each larva is ready to make its cocoon, which it does by extruding through spinnerets (or, holes in the head) a liquid protein which solidifies on contact with air. Rotating its body in a figure-of-eight motion, the larva spins a single strand of silk of up to one hundred meters long, taking between three and eight days to encase itself. As silk-maker, or sericultivator, you would next immerse the cocoons in boiling water to dissolve the gum holding their form, and extract the long, single thread from each. This can then be treated, dyed, spun, woven, and finished. It's an ancient process, with the oldest traces of silk found in China at Neolithic digs, and one with a rich history in France; Diderot and d'Alembert include instructions in the "Rural Economy" section of their Encylopédie. Here, in the Mary Ann Beinecke Decorative Art Collection at the Clark Institute, Massachusetts, is a more recent example of silk production. It's a lovely French silk sample book, dating from between 1895 to 1905, consisting of 139 pages onto which are stuck small scraps of fabric. (The collection has similar books that present examples of embroidery, brocade, lace, and weaving patterns. See our previous collection post for another French sample book, of 1863, though that one collects watercolour copies of fabric patterns, whereas this example has the actual fabric.) This silk collection is clearly a working tool of some kind — the pages are annotated, with what look like notes on the weight of the fabric, and names that might be designer, customer, or manufacturer? There are comments on the colourways, too, distinguishing between plain stripes in noir, marine, lido, or bordeaux, while the polka-dots come in a selection of names that are almost as pretty as the silks themselves: cyclamen violet, emeraude blanc, ciel bordeaux. There are woozy tartans, delicate chintzes, smart dots and stripes, Richter-esque roses, Missoni-style zig-zags. Below are some of our favourites; browse the whole sample book to find inspiration for your own, silky style.

public-domain-review

Feb 16, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:15.556704

pedro-de-rojas-don-quixote-in-the-20th-century

Don Quixote in the 20th Century (ca. 1905) Text by Hunter Dukes Dec 9, 2020 “The course of events will tell, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote; “time, that discloses all things, leaves nothing that it does not drag into the light of day, though it be buried in the bosom of the earth. But enough of that for the present; let us go and see Master Pedro’s show, for I am sure there must be something novel in it.”—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, chapter XXV These colorful chromolithograph postcards by the Spanish cartoonist Pedro de Rojas reimagine the adventures of Don Quixote for the twentieth century. We see the Knight of the Melancholy Countenance fighting with what appears to be a park ranger (the caption identifies him as the Knight of the Forest), entering a classy hotel with an umbrella under his arm, and jousting while riding in a motorcar. The series of postcards closely follows the adventures of Cervantes’ Quixote, beginning with the gentleman reading too many books of chivalry in his study and proceeding through many adventures to his feverish death. Unlike other turn-of-the-century visions of the future's fashions, transportation, and social progress, here the twentieth century seems already retrograde: this Quixote may mount a hot air balloon to tilt at the windmills in his panoply, but little hints at industrialization, urbanization, or other contemporary shifts in modern life. Most of the scenery is nearly timeless: sparse rooms and country roads. It’s fitting that a seventeenth-century epic, about a man who imagines himself a medieval knight-errant, might struggle to find its place in the future, or de Rojas’ present. The postcards take part in a long tradition of illustrating the exploits of the hapless knight and his squire Sancho Panza — see our essay “Picturing Don Quixote” by Rachel Schmidt for more on the book's iconography through the centuries. And yet, the serial, keepsake nature of these chromolithographs make them equal parts illustration and ephemera, joining various quixotic curiosities that appeared in the period, such as this album for collecting image-laden candy wrappers that surrounded a Spanish sweet called “Caramelos del Quijote”, sold by the confectioner Matías López in 1900. Born in Seville in 1873, Pedro de Rojas worked for several Madrid newspapers in his twenties before moving to Cuba in 1903 and, later, to Buenos Aires, where he died on September 4, 1947. In Argentina, de Rojas helped develop comics into a popular new medium for artistic expression. Comic strips first appeared in domestic papers around 1907 as importations from the United States. The second half of the nineteenth century had seen the rise of color magazines in Argentina, which — as one such periodical, El Mosquito, claimed — sought to provide caricatures “at the level of Charivari of Paris and Punch of London”. It was only natural, given the growing hunger amid a certain class of readers for social and political commentary, that comics slotted easily into these glossy pages. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, de Rojas declined North America’s influence on the form, choosing instead to draw on European traditions, cross established codes between text and image, and explore clashing subjectivities instead of a recurring protagonist’s plight. One of de Rojas’ most striking experiments, shared with us by our reader Lucas Nine, was a comic known as “Don Salamito y Doña Gaviota”. As Nine explains: “The novelty was how readers could choose, by mail, the names of the old couple that starred in the strip, actions for them to perform, and, eventually, the time and causes of their deaths, giving some interactive flavor to the thing.” Alongside his comics, de Rojas helped found the influential magazine La Vida Moderna in 1907, and provided illustrations for Caras y Caretas, the famous children’s’ magazine PBT, and Crítica, known for its sensationalist images, where he worked with prominent writers such as Jorge Luis Borges.

public-domain-review

Dec 9, 2020

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:16.051788

agostino-ramelli-theatre-of-machines

Agostino Ramelli’s Theatre of Machines (1588) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 1, 2021 Instead of an e-reader, picture your favorite books on a portable Ferris wheel, a lazy susan of knowledge and imagination turned on its side. Supplement your jogging habit with a treadmill that literally mills, converting caloric expenditure into bread flour. Or flip another page to find: bandsaws and bellows powered by rivers; ecological cofferdams; and a fountain that uses hydrostatic pressure to sing the songs of birds, beckoning nightingales to preen beneath its spouting showers. If this sounds like an Arcadian vision of the future, it is a future from the past. Agostino Ramelli’s 1588 Le diverse et artificiose machine (Diverse and artificial machines) features these devices (and about two hundred others) in an intricately illustrated volume. Published in Paris as a bilingual edition dedicated to King Henri III, the French and Italian tome has as much in common with literary texts as mechanical manuals. Ramelli’s designs gain their value not from practicality and efficiency (few were ever built), but from “classical gravitas”, visual imitations of the antiquity that Renaissance scholars and artists were busy rediscovering and, in turn, inventing. A Catholic soldier who developed his mechanical prowess in the military, Ramelli trained with the Marquis of Marignano before moving to France to fight against the Huguenots. Equally devoted to mathematics and war, Ramelli included in his book what Witold Rybczysnki describes, in his history of screws and screwdrivers, as “a number of siege engines, cunning pontoon bridges that unfold like accordions, scaling machines, and monstrous catapults.” But Ramelli directs the most energy to the peaceful manipulation of water: dozens of devices for raising, diverting, and channeling aquatic bodies. Despite the complex detail with which Ramelli draws and describes his inventions, the illustrations obscure as much as they reveal, evincing what Jonathan Sawday calls Renaissance writers’ “general love of concealment, hidden revelation, and secrecy”. Ramelli had good reason for not tipping his hand. In the introduction, his pen turns poisonous when describing how other inventors had “furtively robbed me of my special drawings”. While perhaps the most famous of his time, Ramelli was not the only Renaissance machinist. Aspects of his book resemble and influenced works by Giovanni Branca, Jacopo Strada, Vittorio Zonca, and Michelangelo. Most prescient, perhaps, was his book wheel, which Megan Garber has called “the Kindle of the 16th century”. Borrowing the epicyclic gearing mechanism from astronomical clocks, Ramelli envisioned the machine to be of use to “anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout.” More impressive than its workings was the circular form — which some read as an anticipation of how printed and digital texts came to circulate globally — and its system of shelves, which work almost like web-browser tabs. Curiously, the revolving reader might be indebted to Chinese innovation, where similar machines appear in Buddhist temples during the sixth century. Joseph Needham, for example, believes that a description of rotating Ming “kiosques” found its way to Europe via Shah Rukh, son of Timur. Today, Ramelli’s device still retains fans: Anthony Grafton, Professor of History at Princeton University, supposedly has one in his office, and students at Rochester Institute of Technology built a historically-accurate replica in 2019 based on Ramelli’s drawings.

public-domain-review

Apr 1, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:16.558861

the-sorceress-jan-van-de-velde

The Sorceress by Jan van de Velde II (1626) Text by Adam Green Oct 29, 2020 This remarkable engraving of a sorceress mid-conjure is the work of Dutch Golden Age painter and engraver Jan van de Velde the younger. In Van de Velde's energetic and artfully arranged scene we see a young sorceress at work above a fire and, cavorting in its windswept flames, a motley crew of various demonic “familiars”. Amid the talons, wings, and characterful faces, there are pipes-a-plenty, with two notably placed up a demon's bum and streaming with powders in elegant arcs. The Latin at the base of the print gives a clue as to the meaning of the print, which seems to be a commentary on the perils of temptation: “What evils Desire commands, in the small secluded place; who, by sweet incantation, overcomes the minds of the purest mortals, induces frenzy in everyone! But how quickly it slips by; Death overtakes brief life, brief delights. Laughing for a moment, in eternity suffering regret.” (Translation by Ross Caldwell.) The sentiment seems to be backed up by the presence of dice and cards in the foreground, symbols of the vice of gambling and fleeting pleasure. While this image may meet our eyes today in a positive and almost joyful manner, behind there lies a much darker history. Between the years 1560–1630 Europe suffered its most intense and violent period of witch-trials. The Little Ice Age decimated crops and the impoverished found their scapegoat in the figure of the witch. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) added still more devastation and chaos into the mix. The year of this print's creation, 1626, saw the birth of some of the worst and most deadly witch-trials to occur in Europe — in Bamberg and Würzburg, and elsewhere in central Germany — which together led to the torture and murder of more than 1000 people (mostly women). Related reading: our essay “Woodcuts and Witches”, in which Jon Crabb explores the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats — so familiar today.

public-domain-review

Oct 29, 2020

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:17.179723

napoleon-bonaparte-death-mask

The Story of Napoleon’s Death Mask (1915) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 2, 2021 Who cast Napoleon Bonaparte’s death mask? Was it Francis Burton — Surgeon of the 66th Regiment of Foot and uncle to Sir Richard Francis — who searched for “gypsum by torchlight” to mix the plaster of Paris mold? Or François Carlo Antommarchi, the fallen emperor’s personal physician on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, whose boorish personality led his patient to figure him “an ignorant and unreliable bungler”? And might it be true that Madame Bertrand (attendant to the dying, dethroned king) annexed the matrix, barely dry, mashing its ears by crushing their helices into the conchae? In the 1820s, Parisian elites loyal to Napoleon took quasi-religious pilgrimages to see this imperial relic’s many copies: the face of a man variously remembered as Commander of La Grande Armée, The Emperor of Elba, The Corsican Fiend, The Modern Hannibal, or simply as Boney. Bearing Napoleon’s likeness, the death mask inherited its subject’s complexities. George Leo de St. M. Watson’s The Story of Napoleon’s Death Mask (1915) examines the scholarship surrounding the cast’s creator and finds an atmosphere “so charged with invention, calumny, innuendo, scandal, bad blood, espionage, and so forth, that even the robust inquirer is gradually and unconsciously demoralized”. Engorged with bons mots and brimming with pith, the investigation, in its author’s own words, moves between “the hot sword-play of polemic” and “the chill spade-work of research”. But both sword and spade are closer to cudgel. Regarding Antommarchi’s suspicious, delayed assertion (seemingly timed with Burton’s death) that he himself was sole creator, Watson compares the admission to how one might “in middle age bethink himself of some smart waistcoat sported in adolescence and fetch it from a cobwebbed trunk to see if it still fitted!” Regarding a dubious wax version of the cast, Watson thinks that nothing “more grotesque and more preposterous” exists in Napoleonic iconography, a phiz he quips to be about as human as Melpomene, the mask of tragedy. The only solution can be inebriation on the part of its possessor: Capt. Winneberger of the Bavarian army. “No doubt the monstrosity was moulded in wax one night by a slashed and salted young Fuchs”. This would explain why it conjures “the prosopomorphic quart-pot of a Munich beer-cellar, minus the handle, snapped off in student’s row!” Watson’s fondness of exclamation is rivaled only, perhaps, by Napoleon’s penchant for conquest. Why the controversy? Aside from the ambiguity of origin story, the death mask shows little sign of disease for a man who (supposedly) died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-one. And it lacked the “Attic features”, “morose Roman gravitas”, and “stony, Sphingian stare” that steadily crystallized in Napoleon’s portraiture as he ascended the alpine heights of fame. Complicated by the statesman’s belief that it is not “the exactness of the features, a wart on the nose which gives resemblance. . . [but] the character [of great men] that dictates what must be painted”, the death mask’s incongruencies disturbed nineteenth-century phrenologists. An ancient practice, funerary casting’s apex “correlates with the rise of a modern culture of celebrity across the watershed of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries”, writes D. Graham Burnett, as well as public interest in physiognomy (the attempt to discern moral character in facial characteristics) and phrenology (the attempt to map the correlation between psychological qualities and the shape of a cranial surface). According to Watson, Napoleon’s death mask led experts in the latter field to declare that the skull “had not the bumps or the bony development requisite for a hero”. Little Boney indeed. Funerary casting faced its own Waterloo not long after Napoleon’s death. With the popularization of photography and cinema, celluloid film became the new index of reality. And it’s easier to take a snapshot than to rub a corpse with inspissated oil and other unguents. But the lore around Napoleon’s reliquary lives on: what Watson calls the mysteries of “those more recondite organs”, lopped during the autopsy and smuggled to Corsica. For better or worse, Watson himself left behind neither a mask nor much of a biography to go on.

public-domain-review

Mar 2, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:17.629474

night-of-the-living-dead

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) Text by Melissa McCarthy Oct 29, 2020 While the word “zombie” first appears in English as far back as 1819, in poet Robert Southey’s History of Brazil (as the Angolan word for deity/spirit), it wasn't properly introduced to Western culture until William Seabrook’s sensationalised accounts of Haitian voodoo cults in The Magic Island (1929). It is the slave plantations of Haiti which are usually identified as the birthplace of the zombie concept, where enslaved Africans responded to their conditions by developing practices of voodoo, and a belief in a dead body that could be reanimated and controlled. Of course, the idea of the walking dead can be seen as distinct from Haitian traditions, and in Western culture predates Seabrook — see for example H. P. Lovecraft's 1922 horror story “Herbert West–Reanimator” — but it was The Magic Island's vivid descriptions of “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life” that seemed to really capture the twentieth-century imagination, in US cinema in particular. A spate of zombie-filled films followed: Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932) (starring Bela Lugosi) and its sequel Revolt of the Zombies (1936), Jean Yarbrough's King of the Zombies (1941), and Jacques Tourneu's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), to name a few. These were all films that played, to various levels of crudeness, with the Haitian voodoo stereotype. But it perhaps wasn't until George A. Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead — made out-of-hours on a shoe-string budget by the then 28-year-old director — that the lumbering undead took the form so familiar today. Though Variety magazine labeled it an “unrelieved orgy of sadism”, Romero's vision has proved enduringly popular, and hugely influential on a subsequent genre of cinema that constructs social satire through horror. Director Jordan Peele has celebrated its influence on his 2017 hit Get Out, a film which is treated to an excellent reading, or viewing, by Zadie Smith on the appropriation and theft of pain, of artistic subjects, and of living and near-living bodies. In addition to its late-show popularity, Night of the Living Dead has prompted plentiful, more cerebral examination. New York's Museum of Modern Art is proud to have picked up on the film's high-art virtues as early as 1970, while zombies will cement their place in academia with the forthcoming George A. Romero Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Romero’s zombies emerge within various strands of academic thought. It’s not just the presence of protagonist Ben, a Black man among white fellow victims, whose death has lynch mob overtones, but the figure of the zombie itself, that gives Night of the Living Dead an important presence in Black Studies. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon traces a history of “zombie biopolitics” back to origins in the Caribbean plantation, while Kaiama L. Glover in a short presentation recognises the figure as embodying anxieties about those from the global south who might threaten “us”, “here”. In a related field of study, Céline Keller’s article does a good job of situating the zombie within a history of philosophy, cyborgism, and transhumanism. Romero himself couldn’t be kept down; he followed Night of the Living Dead with Dawn, Day, Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead. It’s a film and a concept that — like its monstrous subject — has a tendency towards survival. But why did such an enduring artwork emerge just when it did? The zombies in Night of the Living Dead are irradiated, and this was, after all, still the age of nuclear anxiety – the previous year, 1967, had seen the US record its highest total of stockpiled nuclear weapons. It was also the height of civil unrest in the US. MoMA’s take on the film is that: Released at a time when disillusionment was running rampant in the country — spurred by the Vietnam War and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy — Americans identified with the film’s most shocking suggestion: death is random and without purpose. No one dies for the greater good or to further the survival of others. Instead, people die to feed faceless, ordinary America. Some might see parallels with own age of pandemic and ecological crisis. As Jon Towlson’s 2018 introduction for the British Film Institute notes: Night of the Living Dead takes us into the apocalypse almost in real time. . . . The effect is to create a very powerful sense of a definitive point of change: we see the precise moment that history collapses. The collapse of history is a powerful and (most would say) depressing image, but perhaps one not entirely devoid of life — there seems to be something extricating itself from the wreckage, stretching out its arms towards us, drooling…

public-domain-review

Oct 29, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:18.071970

serviette-sculptures-the-forgotten-art-of-napkin-folding

Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 2, 2021 “There should always be a pretty centerpiece”, instructs Sarah Field Splint in The Art of Cooking and Serving, a Depression-era etiquette guide that greased the rails for Crisco shortening's steady slide into the American home. During Margaret Atwood's 2006 short story named after Splint's book, her preteen protagonist weighs decoration against utility. “The charm of my centrepiece would not however cancel out the shabbiness of our paper napkins”. Mattia Giegher's 1629 Trattato delle piegature (Treatise on folding) offers an elegant solution to the young girl's quandary: nix the centerpiece and fold your napkins into finery worthy of display. Giegher's Trattato appeared as part of Li tre tratatti (1629), joining his earlier works on meat carving (Il trinciante) and stewardship (Lo scalco). While we crease modern napkins as an entrée to the main task — a lap dam for gravy, say, or neck-tucked against crustacean spray — Giegher's creations were never meant for dabbing. These were starched objets d'art. During the fifteenth century in northern Italy and southern Germany, technical knowledge of the mechanical arts (think: crafts, machinery, and culinary recipes) began to appear in vernacular writing. “Why around 1400 did artisans take up pen and paper with such gusto?” asks Pamela H. Smith about these early modern how-to guides. Her answer involves war technologies, state power, and urban, cultural exchange. Come the seventeenth century, with literacy on the rise in pockets of Europe, the proliferation of manuals on carving, table service, and, in Giegher's case, napkin folding suggests a widening interest in knowledge once exclusive to the princely domain. Born sometime around 1589 in Moosburg, the Duchy of Bavaria, Giegher (né Matthias Jäger) moved to the Republic of Venice to study the arts of the dining table. Soon he Italianized his name and used a professional epithet: “carver to the German nation in Padua.” An expert at dismembering animals, the Trattato proved that Giegher could also resurrect them in broadcloth bestiaries. After a brief introduction to the art and its stakes, Giegher turns to illustrations of his technique and the resultant finery. In the first images, we see a pair of disembodied hands at work on the herringbone shape, a pleat that lends its name to his napkin animals (“animali di spinapesce”). From the initial fold quickly follows the finished creations: pheasants, the winged Lion of Saint Mark, and a “mer-dog” (un cane “ma con la coda di pesce”). Like the creatures themselves, some of Giegher's folded fauna seem (almost) impossible. The first treatise on napkin folding, Giegher's Trattato is an important example of the wider  tradition of trionfi da tavola (triumphs of the table), arcane creatures and architectural abstractions crafted out of napkins, glass, wood, wax, and tragacanth. Published as oblong quarto, a format usually reserved for musical scores and sewing patterns, his Trattato reflects the influence of tailoring and anticipates the later art of Troublewit, paper animated by accordion folds, as well as ornamental orange peeling. It would be easy to dismiss this napkin craft as trifling. The diarist Samuel Pepys fantasized about paying a practitioner to teach his wife the art because he liked it so much. But modern “virtuoso of the fold” Joan Sallas, who has recreated several of Giegher's trionfi, reminds us that these objects had Sinnbilder: symbolic meaning in German baroque. Folding professionals “were trained not only in technique and artistry, but also in culture and the humanities, including recurrent themes like heraldry and mythology.” Nuremberg once housed an entire school devoted to the art. All the same it was often servants, those “silent familiars of early modern households”, who practised the craft on a daily basis. In Giegher's manual, as Deborah L. Crohn writes, “their hands were allowed to speak with an eloquence that belied their status”.

public-domain-review

Feb 2, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:18.531178

sea-shanties

The Music of the Waters: A Collection of Sea Shanties (1888) Text by Melissa McCarthy Jan 19, 2021 We don’t know much about Laura Alexandrine Smith, except that she lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, where her father was Russian vice-consul, and that she was — as evidenced by this wonderful collection of sea shanties and their surrounding culture — an exemplary ethnomusicologist. As a writer, she was clearly interested in the anthropological aspects of musical genres (her second book looked at Gypsy music) and here in The Music of the Waters her focus is on the song-bellowing sailor, whether a Nile boatman, Venetian gondolier, Indian rower, or Dutch herring-fisher. With its roots in a series of articles commissioned by The Shipping World, Smith subsequently grew the book out into a delightfully rich compilation — for each song collected there's a musical score, lyrics, alternative versions and translations, as well as the song's history, contextual background, and the activity that the song was designed to accompany. She also includes, as the final chapter, a section on superstitions and legends relating to seas, rivers, and lakes. It is a delightful mix of rich literary scholarship and, what we might now call, immersive research. “She has personally gone”, as R. M. Ballantyne (author of copious maritime adventure tales for children) says in his Introductory Note, “straight to the 'fo'c'sle,' and interviewed the sailors not only of her own, but of other lands, and thus has gathered from the men's own lips, and from their manly voices, the words and melodies which are most popular among them.” Of particular note for Ballantyne was Smith’s willingness to “beard the lion in his den”, in interviewing the denizens of this mainly masculine, and extremely harsh, work environment. Not that the shanties were exclusively male — alongside “Whiskey Johnny”, “Blow the Man Down”, and “Married to a Mermaid”, Smith’s collection includes Russian and Gaelic chants sung by women as they crushed the grain on the wharf, previous to loading the vessels with it. Work is, of course, a dominant theme throughout the book and its songs, and it is worth reminding ourselves that seas shanties differ markedly from sea songs in this respect, as a recent JSTOR Daily piece highlights. Smith concurs. For her it is rhythm which is central to the shanty and its relationship to work. While they might accompany a wide range of different activities — including hauling, capstan work, and pumping — rhythm is central to all of them, so as to coordinate the labour of groups. She specifies, “here is the true singing of the deep sea — it is not recreation, it is an essential part of the work”. Below you can browse other collections of maritime working songs, none so comprehensive or as international in reach as Smith's, but certainly worth a browse and maybe a sing.

public-domain-review

Jan 19, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:18.826348

adam-wirsing-marmora

A Book of Stone: Adam Wirsing’s Marmora (1776) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 10, 2021 “Marble is a brilliant material”, exclaims the art historian Michael Greenhalgh, while listing the stone’s admirable properties: beauty, solidity, polish, and the ability to endure. Without this stately rock, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Parthenon, and Taj Mahal would have decayed to dust long ago. From the Greek word for “shining stone”, marble illuminates the past by letting it stay visible. And the words we use to distinguish its types are almost as lustrous as the thing itself. Calacatta, Talathello, Carrara, Levadia, Makrana . . . and more. “There are few productions of the natural world that exhibit a greater variety of kinds or species than marble”, wrote a correspondent for The Monthly Review in 1776, praising Adam Ludwig Wirsing’s Marmora et adfines aliquos lapides coloribus suis exprimi (Illustrations of marble types and some related stones). An engraver, art dealer, and limner, Wirsing published his book in Latin and German, adopting the Latinized sobriquet of Adamicus Ludovicus for the occasion. Though born in Dresden, he focused on his adult environs, the area surrounding Nuremberg, and worried less about aesthetics than authenticity. He produced his guide to “banish the confusion, and prevent the frauds, that take place in this branch of natural history”. Today, Wirsing is best remembered for the quiet elegance of his illustrations. Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to stone. In some, the patterns look like landscapes in miniature, abstract anticipations of artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who shared Wirsing’s marbled pallet. Squinting at other squares, marble’s limestone origins appear preserved within the vivid plates: archaic lifeforms, transformed under geological pressure, swirling and circling just out of sight. Long after the last copy of Wirsing’s Marmora crumbles between a careful reader’s fingers, his object of study will remain unfazed, graceful, and awaiting rediscovery.

public-domain-review

Mar 10, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:19.254307

greek-masquerade

Greek Masquerade (1771) Text by Melissa McCarthy Nov 12, 2020 The shepherdess and shepherd, the bride and groom, the priestess and monk, and the sutler and grenadier: these are the characters of the Mascarade à la Grecque, a parade of fantastical, architectural outfits from the imagination of French artist Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801), who appears himself in the final image in the guise of a bespectacled architect. Although Petitot was indeed Court Architect at Parma from 1753, these designs — etched and published by Benigno Bossi — are, of course, neither plans for buildings, nor sketches for actual garments. Rather, the Mascarade is Petitot's way of poking fun at the prevailing fashion for the goût grec, or “Greek taste”, that flourished in France in the 1750s. A reaction to the ornamental excesses of the Rococo style, the goût grec ushered in the neoclassical style, and is characterised by forms such as acanthus leaves, pilasters, Ionic scrolls, and meander patterns. Petitot takes this style to a ridiculous extreme, in which humans and their clothing morph into objects: shoes become bricks, elbows in sleeves are angled pediments, the sutler's stomach is her oven. This application of the goût grec into the human body is Petitot's take on fashion gone mad; it's his badinage, his little joke, as he explains in one introduction to the designs. Petitot's Parma was a Francophile centre for decorative arts, under the influence of the Marquis of Felino. In other versions of the Mascarade at the Cleveland Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Marquis is the dedicatee, but by the LACMA version pictured here, the avis explains that in order not to "harm his modesty", his name has been removed from the dedication. One suspects that the Marquis' impending fall from Hapsburg favour might also have played a role in this change. The Met's version of the Mascarade appears in a volume along with other collections of Petitot's designs for vases and fireplaces. You can compare his plans for a vase held by lions, with its translation into a tangible object in ormolu and porphyry, auctioned by Christies. Petitot's Mascarade costumes, in contrast, were never meant to be realised. As curator Femke Speelberg says in her two-minute video for the Met's 82nd & Fifth series, the images in the album are ”masterpieces of ingenuity that display the human inclination towards fantasy”.

public-domain-review

Nov 12, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:19.742149

kalevala

English Translation of Finland’s Epic Poem, The Kalevala (1898) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 23, 2021 A divine maiden of the air descends to undifferentiated waters. She becomes pregnant from the wind and a duck lays an egg on her leg. Incubating, it grows too hot to touch. When she flinches, it falls, and the world, sun, and moon are formed from the shards. Then comes her son, Väinämöinen, who sows the forests. And things take a turn for the worse. He gets into a contest with a wiseman from the North, captures him in a mire. As a last resort, the defeated offers his sister’s hand in marriage. But Aino would rather drown than wed Väinämöinen. And from her mother’s tears come the rivers, come the birches, come the cuckoos, who still sing these songs of sorrow. This is how the world begins in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic poem, first published in the nineteenth century. Later in the text, there will be talking salmon, forest demons, wolves that stalk the deadlands, incest, suicide, and a mysterious artefact called the Sampo, forged by a legendary blacksmith, which acts like an anchor for the universe. After more than twenty-thousand lavish verses, the poem ends with modesty and apology: perhaps the singer droned on too long. And perhaps it was a wretched performance. If so, this could not be helped — he never had proper training. Maybe someone else will sing it better in the future. Much like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Kalevala finds its roots in an oral tradition. During a period of famine and cholera in the early nineteenth century, the Finnish physician Elias Lönnrot travelled through Karelia, an ethnic region that now straddles the border of Finland and Russia. Here he heard folk singing, backed by an instrument called the kantele (a zither formed from pike bones in the Kalevala). Noticing common patterns and themes, Lönnrot began to transcribe the music, sorting the myths and lore intoned by local bards. The richness of this tradition almost defies description. Arhippa Perttunen (1769-1840), an important source for Lönnrot — who was supposedly undefeated in village song competitions — remembered fishing trips in his childhood as impromptu concerts that explained the cosmos. “They often sang all night hand in hand by the fire, and the same song was never sung twice”. Here the history of Finland’s national poem becomes indistinguishable from the kind of myth-making it contains. Was Lönnrot unearthing the fragments of a single, scattered story? Or imposing cohesion where there was previously none? According to some, the physician pieced back together the fractured narrative, as if mending a bone, which had been shattered across the tongues of rural singers. “There was no problem of personal style”, writes the British translator Keith Bosley, “the ancient poetry which is now called Kalevala poetry has a single style transcending not only individual talent but even region and century”. Others, like the Finnish historian Timo Vihavainen, offer a more skeptical genealogy: “Finnish folklorists arrived at the conclusion that Kalevala had not been born in any particular part of Finland but on Elias Lönnrot’s writing table”. The impact of the Kalevala has been outsized, at home and abroad. Ending with an invocation of “the rising folk of Suomi” (the country’s name in Finnish), Lönnrot’s poem helped invent and recover the mythology of a people who had been under Swedish rule since the twelfth century and absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1809. Inspiring a revival of the Finnish language among educated, wealthy citizens, the Kalevala had a curiously democratizing effect, as the burgeoning interest in Finnish required crossing class lines to obtain linguistic proficiency. Beyond Fennoscandia, the Kalevala offered a blueprint for national becoming. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based The Song of Hiawatha, his troublesome attempt to craft America’s “first” epic, on the meter of the Kalevala — a rhythm known as trochaic tetrameter, which sounds slightly stilted in English (and famously reserved by Shakespeare for fairy speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). It may come as no surprise, then, that J. R. R. Tolkien’s elvish was also inspired by the poem and its language. “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before”, he wrote in a letter to the poet W.H. Auden. After eleven song-collecting field trips, Lönrott published a version of the Kalevala in 1835 and a revised, expanded edition in 1849. The text led to an outpouring of paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), Robert Wilhelm Ekman (1808-1873), and Joseph Alanen (1885-1920) — and continues to inspire contemporary Finnish artists such as Hannu Väisänen (b. 1951) and Sirpa Alalääkkölä (b. 1964). John Martin Crawford first translated the Kalevala into English in 1888, a project that arose from his desire “to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology”. Noting that Finnish is a language where “every word [is] connected with the powers and elements of nature”, his preface describes the “great care” taken “in rendering these finely shaded verbs”. Read the text above and find below a selection of images from a dedicated Kalevala collection at the Finnish National Gallery, including works by Joseph Alanen and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. You can purchase a copy of Keith Bosley’s recent English translation here.

public-domain-review

Mar 23, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:20.105555

twenty-eight-years-of-co-partnership-at-guise

Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise (1908) Text by Melissa McCarthy Jan 7, 2021 In the foreground of the picture we see a woman occupied in preparing a cot. Let us make our bow to her as we pass. She is the senior employee of the Nursery, good Madame Roger, whose intimate friends call her affectionately the “universal mother.” Three generations of young “Familistèrians” have been cared for, fondled and washed by her clever hands. We greet Madam Roger here on a tour of the Familistère, or “Social Palace”, a large, multi-purpose housing complex built in the French town of Guise by the industrialist and social innovator Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817-1888). Godin and his works are the much-admired subjects of Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise, the second edition of Aneurin Williams' English translation of Le Familistère illustré, resultats de vingt ans d'association, 1880-1900 by Dallet, Fabre and Prudhommeaux. Williams was a Liberal politician, and his translation is introduced by his fellow Member of Parliament, the working class, trade unionist Thomas Burt, and published jointly by Garden City Press (of Letchworth, a “garden city” designed by social reformer Ebenezer Howard) and the Labour Co-partnership Association, an “educational, advisory, and propagandist body”. It's clear that Godin's activism piqued the interest of a certain, socialist-minded section of British politics. And deservedly so: a decade after the 1840 establishment of his cast-iron cooking stove business, Godin began developing the idea of “a co-operative association of labour, capital, and ability”. His reason, that he wished to encourage, exalt, glorify labour. It is labour which makes the superiority of man over the brute ; it is labour which creates and multiplies wealth ; it is to labour that the greater part of that wealth should rightfully return. Godin appears to have been remarkably, tangibly successful in these aims. By 1861 the first housing for workers was occupied, with more to follow. The full extent of the Familistère was a site of eighteen acres, containing the foundry itself; three large residential blocks for twelve hundred workers (who included women) and family members, arranged along galleries around a glass-roofed courtyard; a nursery and school; a theatre, garden allotments and cellars; a communal laundry and swimming pool; and the economats block housing shops offering near-cost-priced food. An article for Harper's Magazine in 1872 describes the site in detail, showing on the “General Plan” shops, fountains on every story, halls for general education, and a bakery, a café, and a casino. Godin was not content to stop at construction; in 1880 he converted the community into a co-operative society, owned and directed by the workers who lived there. In all of this community-building, Godin was strongly influenced by other socialist and utopian thinkers of his era. He was a keen follower of Charles Fourier, with his plans for a phalanstery-dwelling, utopian community, and was also interested in the projects of the English educational reformer Robert Owen, who had followed improvements to his factory town at New Lanark, Scotland, with the establishment of an experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825-7. Godin also invested (to the tune of a third of his fortune, states Williams) in Victor Considerant's short-lived colony of La Reunion, Texas, between 1855 and 1857. In the high-quality construction and the consideration of residents' needs, one might also compare the Familistère to British factory towns also built during the 1890s, such as the Cadbury family's Bournville or the Lever Brothers' Port Sunlight, although these projects had none of Godin's socialist ideals. After fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and serving as a deputé during the 1870s, Godin died in 1888, but the community proved perhaps surprisingly durable. It was not until the 1950s that saucepan manufacturers Le Creuset bought out the foundry, and the co-operative association for La Familistère was only dissolved in 1968. The buildings themselves suffered some decay, but in 1991 were classified as a monument historique, and today the site is thriving, a renovated, tourist-friendly destination. One can still wander the gardens and read on Godin's mausoleum his carved exhortation, with which the admiring Williams closes Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise, Come to this tomb when you have need to be reminded that I founded the Familistère for brotherly association and partnership. ... Pardon the wrongs which others do to you. ... Be just towards all and you will serve as an example.

public-domain-review

Jan 7, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:20.590482

folk-stories-from-southern-nigeria

Ikom Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria (1913) Text by Melissa McCarthy Dec 8, 2020 In his introduction to Ikom Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria (1913) the British colonial administrator Elphinstone Dayrell explains his story-gathering modus operandi: These folk stories have been told to me by natives of the various countries to which they relate in the Ikom district of Southern Nigeria. In all cases they have had to be translated by an interpreter, and frequently it has been found necessary to employ two. Some of the stories are very old and have been handed down from one generation to another, but it is most difficult, almost impossible, to judge with any degree of accuracy how old they really are. During his spell as District Commissioner in the period preceding 1914, when the British pulled together the north and south of Nigeria into one colony, Dayrell pursued his interest in the culture, history, and folktales of the Igbo people of the south-eastern regions, near the Niger Delta. It was the Igbo (the children and grandchildren of those interviewed by Dayrell), who suffered a genocide of an estimated 1 to 3 million people during the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s — a war with its bloody roots firmly planted in the 1914 amalgamation enforced by Dayrell and his fellow colonialists. The tales in Ikom Folk Stories were gathered during 1910 and 1911, from a range of informants, each of whom Dayrell credits. There is a photograph of “Chief Indoma of Inkum, son of the powerful Chief Indoma, about whom several of the stories are told”, including one “Concerning the Human Sacrifices which took place” on his death. Dayrell also adds notes which explain local detail, or which place events in historical context. Of “The Cunning Hare”, he explains, “This is one of their old stories, which they brought with them when they were driven south by the Awala tribe, and is still handed on from one generation to another.” The stories mix this historical record with creation myths and animal fables. We are told of Inkang, who brought up a mushroom baby boy; of dispute between the spider and the grasshopper; of a heroic tortoise. There is even one, final tale from the singing and dancing girl Ennenni, on the topic of the first meeting between the penis and the vagina, that Dayrell considers so “unfit for publication” that he presents it in Latin. The inclusion of such an X-rated story, albeit obscured under the veil of Latin, in addition to the emphasis given to identifying the storytellers and the more immediate history of the Ikom region, speaks of the context within which Dayrell’s volume was published — part of a series of “Occasional Papers” put out by the Royal Anthropological Society. Three years earlier Dayrell published a much more commercially-minded collection, Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, West Africa (1910), which eschews the anthropological and historical detail for a focus on more straight-up creation myths such as “Why the Sun and the Moon live in the Sky” and animal explanatory fables, like “Why the Flies Bother the Cows”. The stories included extend to the supernatural, such as in “The Disobedient Daughter who Married a Skull”, but they still retain a down-to-earth practicality, as in “Of the Pretty Stranger who Killed the King”, which offers the moral, “Never marry a stranger, no matter how pretty she may be”. The collection boasts an introduction by the Scottish folklore expert Andrew Lang, whose literary interests ranged over myth, history, religion, and psychical research. While Lang’s political interpretation of the British influence on Nigeria shows his era, he does make an interesting point about the relation of these tales to other traditions, comparing and contrasting with elements from Greek mythology, Zulu stories, French chanson, Celtic legend and many others.

public-domain-review

Dec 8, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:21.108981

rogues-a-study-of-characters-samuel-g-szabo

Samuel G. Szabó’s Rogues, A Study of Characters (1857) Jan 12, 2021 Celebrity photography begins with Mathew Brady. His groundbreaking 1850 book of daguerreotypes, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, presented portraits of twenty-four of “the most eminent citizens of the American Republic”, ranging from the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing to the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. The idea of the album was to present these men (and they were all men) as “representative” — just as, in the 1860s, Brady’s war photography, in Walt Whitman’s words, would gather together portraits of “typical men…from opposing parties and convictions, representing in their varieties and oppositions after all a Common Country”. Samuel G. Szabó’s book Rogues, A Study of Characters, published six years after Brady’s Gallery, aims for another kind of representativeness — not of the eminent, but of the infamous. Indeed, Rogues is one of the first collections of mug shots made available to the general public. The term “rogues’ gallery” had been coined by Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency two years earlier, but Pinkerton circulated his collection of mug shots only among law enforcement agents; the concept of a “rogues’ gallery” didn’t enter common parlance until it was used in the introduction to New York City police chief Thomas Byrnes’ book Professional Criminals of America in 1886. In Szabó’s Rogues, there is no introduction, no statement of purpose — only captions listing the lawbreaker’s name, alias, and offense: murderer, counterfeiter, cracksman, pickpocket, or (an interesting distinction) French pickpocket. Still, it’s hard not to see Szabó’s gallery, like those of Brady, Pinkerton, and Byrnes, as participating in the nineteenth-century mania for identifying “types”. As Simon A. Cole writes in Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification: As soon as photography emerged as a method for recording the identities of known criminals, an irresistible temptation arose to use the same technology for something much more ambitious: to home in on the common physiognomic attributes of known criminals in order to have a picture of what criminals in general might look like and thus to identify criminals prospectively, even before they committed crimes. It would be a mistake, though, to file away Szabó’s Rogues as just another example of early criminal identification. “One may speculate that Szabó made these portraits while working for, or with the cooperation of, the police”, the scholar Malcolm Daniel writes; yet Szabó signed the book as its “photographic artist”, and his subtitle (“a Study of Characters”) is not at all the same thing as a “study of the criminal character”. The men and women depicted by Szabó are individuals: some look menacing, some rakish, some simply miserable. Together, they provide a glimpse not only at the faces of mid-nineteenth century American lawbreakers, but at all the different ways mid-nineteenth century people sat, squinted, wore their hair, neckties, and hats. Szabó himself is quite a mysterious character. Born in Hungary, he appears to have lived in the US only temporarily, from the early or mid-1850s until July 1861. During these years, he spent time in New Orleans, Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. Where he lived when he made this album, no one knows. You can scroll through our highlights below.

public-domain-review

Jan 12, 2021

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:21.593353

baron-munchausens-dream

Baron Munchausen’s Dream (1911) Text by Melissa McCarthy Feb 11, 2021 We've all done it: overindulged at dinner and suffered a night of “sweet visions and rambling nightmares”, where the Three Graces suddenly become crocodile-monsters who leap out of the mirror to pummel us, and the bedroom transforms into an idyllic grotto, only for exploding dragons to torment us, before we wake up in the most unsuitable places. Or perhaps this is peculiar to Baron Munchausen, the hero of Georges Méliès' ten-minute film, made in 1911 (although it's uncertain whether it was released before 1943). Otherwise known as Les Hallucinations du baron de Münchausen, or Les Aventures de baron de Munchhausen, it's generally referred to in English as Baron Munchausen's Dream. Inspired by the real-life eighteenth-century aristocrat of the same name, Münchhausen first appeared in fictional form in 1785, in an English work written by Rudolph Erich Raspe. Raspe kept his name off the covers, perhaps anticipating the real baron's fury at being associated with a character who quickly became a by-word for fabulous flights of far-flung fancy, with many wonderfully-illustrated versions of his adventures making it into print — examples here from 1860; 1867, illustrated by Doré; and 1895. Méliès' Munchausen keeps the plot simple, but uses his customary range of cutting edge cinematic techniques — dissolves, substitution splices, pyrotechnics — to blaze a trail for subsequent twentieth-century versions. French filmmaker Émile Cohl, the Hungarian Josef von Báky (at the behest of Goebbels), the Czech Karel Zeman, and the American-British Terry Gillam are among those who have imagined the baron's exploits. Viewers will recognize the distinctive style, and some of the props, from other Méliès' films, which can be found here. Meanwhile, we wish you sweet dreams.

public-domain-review

Feb 11, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:22.029721

william-hogarth-satire-on-false-perspective

William Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (1754) Text by Melissa McCarthy Jan 6, 2021 William Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective, engraved by Luke Sullivan, offers an Escher-like array of impossible lines and vanishing points: a man lights his pipe from a distant candle; a flock of sheep grow bigger as they recede round a corner; a foreground flag disappears behind a distant tree, and many more. These multiple visual tricks are all jokes to convince the viewer of the necessity of reading and understanding Hogarth's friend Joshua Kirby's book, Dr. Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy, Both in Theory and Practice for which Hogarth's image acted as frontispiece. Kirby, an artist, was, as the title of his own work admits, strongly influenced by the earlier work of the mathematician Brook Taylor. Method of Perspective was instantly popular, with reprints and new editions, and Kirby followed it up with Perspectives in Architecture in 1761. Hogarth too was interested in the mathematical and optical aspects of art. Already famous as a writer, portrait painter, and satirical engraver, in 1753 he published his Analysis of Beauty, in which he plugs Kirby's forthcoming book by explaining that The knowledge of perspective is no small help to the seeing objects truly, for which purpose Dr. Brook Taylor's Linear perspective made easy to those who are unacquainted with geometry, proposed to be publish'd soon by Mr. Kirby of Ipswich, may be of most service. Perspective in art was, of course, not new; Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Chinese artists had all, to varying extents, used techniques to indicate that one element of an image should be thought of as distanced in space. But a formal exposition of a theory took time to emerge. Euclid discussed matters in his Optics, ca. 300 BC, and the scholar Alhazen advanced his ideas in the eleventh-century Opticae Thesaurus. By the Italian Renaissance, artists like Filippo Brunelleschi, Paulo Ucello, and Piero della Francesca were, in addition to producing masterful artworks with an understanding of perspective at their core, writing treatises on the central concepts: that objects appear smaller at a distance, and that parallel lines appear to meet at a vanishing point on a horizon. While the content of Kirby's book takes a straightforward approach, explaining, with illustrations, just how perspective works, the frontispiece introduces Hogarth's characteristic mocking outlook towards the errors of the world. As he captions it, "Whoever makes a Design without the Knowledge of Perspective / will be liable to such Absurdities as are shewn in this Frontispiece". Below, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of all the errors highlighted in Hogarth's print: The man in the foreground's fishing rod's line passes behind that of the man behind him.The sign is moored to two buildings, one in front of the other, with beams that show no difference in depthThe sign is overlapped by two distant trees.The man climbing the hill is lighting his pipe with the candle of the woman leaning out of the upper story window.The crow perched on the tree is massive in comparison to it.The church appears to front onto the river. Both ends of the church are viewable at the same time.The left horizon on the water declines precipitously.The man in the boat under the bridge fires at the swan on the other side, which is impossible as he's aiming straight at the bridge abutments.The right-hand end of the arch above the boat meets the water further from the viewer than does the left-hand end.The two-story building, though viewed from below, shows the top of the roof. As does the church tower in the distance.The barrel closest to the foreground fisherman reveals both its top and bottom simultaneously.The tiles the foreground fisherman stands on have a vanishing point that converge towards the viewer.A tree is growing out of the top of the bridgeThe vanishing point for the near side of the first building transforms midway down the wall.The line of trees obscuring the sign are likely representative of how objects should decrease in scale as they move further away, but in this case reversed.The sheep on the left-hand side increase in scale as they get further away.The swan behind the boat is larger than the men manning the boat.The base of the tree on the far left is behind the tree to the right of it, but the canopy is in front of the tree to the right of it.The left-most barrel appears to be on lower ground than the other two, when they should be on level ground.The bottom swan is slightly smaller than the cow.The man with the pipe is taller than the trees.The tops and bottoms of the windows on the second building have different vanishing points.

public-domain-review

Jan 6, 2021

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:22.501235

the-universe-as-pictured-in-miltons-paradise-lost

The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 11, 2021 When we talk about fan fiction, we rarely think: “John Milton”. And yet, how better to approach his Paradise Lost (1667), which takes Satan (barely mentioned in the Bible) and makes this fallen arch-fiend into an ambivalent, epic hero? Structured on techniques and themes borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and countless other texts and genres, Milton remixed classical and Renaissance forms to fashion the biblical universe into a setting for English literature’s (perhaps) greatest poem, one which Philip Pullman believes will [“n]ever be surpassed”. And if Milton stoked fandom in turn, he had no keener admirer than William Fairfield Warren, an eclectic scholar and the first president of Boston University. By the time Warren wrote his last work, The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915), he had already made his name by claiming to have discovered the location of Eden. Warren’s Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1881), a study that “positively reeked with academic authority”, argued (across five-hundred, heavily-footnoted pages) that our lost Terrestrial Paradise was once catty-corner to Santa’s workshop. In his final work, Warren turned his attention from Eden to Hell and became a cartographer of the poetic imagination. The pursuit makes counting pin-dancing angels sound like schoolhouse addition. Trying to deduce how Milton intended us to envision the “circumfluous waters calm, in wide / Crystalline ocean” — the poet’s elaboration on God’s creation of a firmament in Genesis — Warren writes that the “Avestan picture of the unitary water-circulation of the universe as the Iranians conceived it presents a most interesting parallel”. Why, but of course. One of the many pleasures in reading this book comes from the presumption of its subtitle: “for personal and class use”. Warren breezily dissects esoterica gleaned from Zoroastrian mysticism, the Sanskrit Rig Veda, and Homeric allusion, never pausing to question if his student-reader can follow. And he grants Milton the same generous benefit of doubt. Finding an inconsistency between the number of ringing celestial spheres in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (nine) and Paradise Lost (ten), the scholar explains that this point of discrepancy in Milton’s Ptolemaic cosmos is moot because “the music of the spheres was produced by the motion of the divinely attuned material spheres, and that the tenth was soundless because by nature immaterial.” Like the poet he admires, Warren will move earth and heaven in his quest for subtle harmonies. Warren was not the first to map Milton’s “facile gates of Hell too slightly barred”. In an appendix to his study, the professor includes diagrams by David Masson, John Andrew Himes, Thomas N. Orchard, and other predecessors. Taken together, they offer whimsical schemata for how to best imagine the realms of chaos, night, and empyrean heaven. A frequent subject for visual artists (notably John Martin, “a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder”, who transposed Adam and Eve into the sublime settings of romanticism and swapped Milton’s republicanism for the revolutionary politics of his own time), Paradise Lost demands to be seen. But Warren had something in mind beyond illustration. There is an ethical dimension to his form of reading. Describing how “[m]yopic interpreters of the Odyssey, possessed of no imagination, have for centuries tried to find Homer’s world within the narrow limits of Hellas and the Levant”, he believes that poor readers have not only “done violence” to poetry, but, as teachers, become “blind leaders of the blind”. There is a knowing irony here. Like Homer, Milton had lost his sight by the time he composed his epic. In order to regain an accurate vision of Paradise Lost, Warren thinks we need to learn to see anew.

public-domain-review

Mar 11, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:22.987124

why-women-should-not-vote

Why Women Should Not Vote (1917) Text by Melissa McCarthy Oct 27, 2020 At the time of the 2016 US presidential election, stationery shops did a brisk trade in entirely blank books, with covers bearing such titles as The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump and Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. A year later Michael J. Knowles topped the Amazon charts with his Reasons to Vote for Democrats, comprising 200 blank pages. It’s an old joke, as this precursor from 1880 shows, and this one from the same year. One of the finest examples of the genre, and at a welcome remove from the petty political-point-scoring mood of many others, is this tiny publication from circa 1917. Despite its novelty angle, this little book from the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company (the publishing arm of the National Woman Suffrage Association) was born from a very serious place: the struggle to gain women the right to vote in the United States. The N. W. S. A. published a range of agitprop, not just comedy items. Virginia Commonwealth University has a collection of texts from the New York-based organisation, including the Headquarters News Letter, an A-B-C of Organization, a guide to fundraising, and information brochures on the proposed changes to the Constitution. There are leaflets targeting specific audiences too: teachers, farmers’ wives, Catholics, Southern white women concerned about “the Negro Vote”. More general-audience books, such as Why Women Should Not Vote also found their way to specific targets. A copy was left on the desk of anti-women’s suffrage Rep. Sherman Berry who decried it as “another sample of … the detestable and cheap politics practiced in this State. Gentlemen, that little book carries no more weight with it than does the picketing of the White House in this time of crisis and peril to this nation and the heckling of our President....” Two years on from the publication of the book (and presumably to Berry’s dismay) the legislative battle for women’s suffrage was won in 1919, with ratification of the 19th Amendment from the required number of states following in 1920: it was prohibited to deny citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was a huge victory, but not the end of the struggle — many women were still, in practice, suppressed from voting. Fifty years earlier, the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race or colour, but suppression of the Black vote continued via the back door through such things as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses (in addition to more violent extralegal means). Such racist measures meant that, come ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, some 75% of Black women were still effectively disenfranchised, and they would continue to be so (along with many Black men) until the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. (See Sharon Harley or Rosalyn Terborg-Penn for recent academic work on the contrasts and convergences of the women’s suffragette movement and that for racial equality.) Native American women too found themselves excluded from the enfranchisement of 1920 — an irony considering the huge influence that gender roles among the Iroquois acted upon N. W. S. A. co-founder Matilda Joslyn Gage. Although Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924, state policies would not let them vote, and wouldn’t do so until 1957. Of course, voting is just part of the picture as regards women’s struggle for full legal participation in society. It took more time, for example, to obtain the right to serve on a jury. And despite the 19th Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th, women’s groups felt the need to keep up the pressure by proposing further, specific protections for women, in the form of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would recognize women’s equal rights to men under the law. First tabled in 1923, the E. R. A.’s history of ratifications and rescissions means that it is yet to be adopted. In law, as in real life, the struggle for full, unfettered suffrage remains like the novelty notebook: with pages still to be written.

public-domain-review

Oct 27, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:23.492025

temperance-stories-and-sketches

Temperance Stories and Sketches (1879) Nov 19, 2020 The 1870s were a decade flooded with temperance literature in America. “Moral suasion” — the attempt to appeal to people through stories, arguments, and threats — was the usual strategy. Probably there is no better way to introduce Edward Carswell’s highly morally suasive Temperance Stories and Sketches — aimed at young readers and published in 1879 — than to quote its opening lines: Let us suppose a case. Suppose that any of you, my young friends, were standing by the river Niagara, and you saw many people in the river dead and dying — men and women, girls and boys, and even little babies — how would you feel? And suppose you saw them come headlong over the awful cataract, some dashed upon the rocks, some being torn in the whirlpool or choked in the rapids, some trying with desperate energy to reach the shore, while others in despair floated down to death without even a struggle for life... Oh! You would cry, this is dreadful. Now, where do they get into the river? Can nothing be done to save them? This intensity about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling underlies the verse, the stories, and the illustrations that follow — all of them apparently created by Carswell. “Old Rye Makes a Speech” gives a very good idea of his usual approach: I was made to be eaten,     And not to be drank;To be thrashed in a barn,     Not soaked in a tank.I come as a blessing     When put through a mill;As a blight and a curse     When run through a still.Make me up into loaves,     And your children are fed;But if into a drink,     I will starve them instead. “The Bird’s Conundrum” follows a similar pattern. In it, a young girl asks why her pet bird was so rude to her cousin and uncle, only to have the bird tell her it was because they were drinking and smoking, which he found both physically and morally repugnant. Some of the poems and prose in Temperance Stories and Sketches are quite a bit darker in tone. “The Four Seasons”, for example, illustrates the career of the intemperate man, from youth’s “cider or a mild cigar”, to middle age’s “wine, and card, or dice”, to winding up, as an old man, “a bloated wreck without a friend, / Who in a ditch or prison finds the end”. Perhaps the most fascinating of Carswell’s pro-temperance inventions, however, are the so-called “Shadow Pictures”, which hide the shape of drunken figures (some oddly inviting in their peaceful slumber) amongst the branches, stumps, fences, and stones of various landscapes. Also worth a mention are the “Hieroglyphic Rebuses”, which force the reader to decode them for yet more clarion calls to be clean, sober, charitable, and kind. It’s questionable whether such cryptic exercises — or for that matter any of Carswell’s texts or images — were lastingly successful in dissuading people from overindulging in various vices. (Mark Twain — who once wrote that “intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance” — would have had his doubts.) But, as artefacts of a political movement and late-nineteenth-century American art, they continue to fascinate.

public-domain-review

Nov 19, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:23.799858

underwater-landscapes-of-eugen-von-ransonnet-villez

En Pleine Mer: The Underwater Landscapes of Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez Text by Melissa McCarthy Dec 1, 2020 In the late 1860s Jules Verne's fictional Captain Nemo cruised the ocean deep discovering new underwater worlds and creatures. In the same decade, the non-fictional Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez pursued his fascination with zoology by developing the technology to produce the first underwater pictures: seascapes drawn as he sat beneath the waves in his diving bell. Ransonnet-Villez was born in 1838 into an aristocratic family in Vienna. Encouraged towards intellectual inquiry, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts at the precocious age of eleven, although he subsequently studied law. Employment from 1858 at the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs allowed him to travel widely and pursue his interests in zoology and art. Following a visit to the Red Sea, Ransonnet-Villez brought out his first book, a volume of sumptuous and detailed lithographs of the seascape and the creatures. He based these on careful, boat-based observation. But during his next year's visit to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Ransonnet-Villez took the plunge and designed for himself a submersible diving bell, in which he could descend beneath the surface to observe the environment more closely. Measuring three feet high by two and half wide and deep, this submersible, of sheet iron and inch-thick glass, had the user's legs sticking out of the bottom so that he could propel himself along the seabed at a depth of five meters or so. It was weighed down by cannonballs, and with air pumped in, the diving bell allowed him to descend for sessions of up to three hours. Jovanovic-Kruspel et al in 2017 point out that ”The sight of a dead dog floating on the surface nearby was a very welcome sight to Ransonnet as it proved to him that there were no sharks to be feared.” Undisturbed, and drawing with a soft pencil on greenish-coloured, varnished paper, Ransonnet could use a tin box to send up to the surface his finished pictures, which he later painted over in oils: the first depictions of the seascape executed by an artist under the sea. Four of these works are reproduced as lithographs (executed by Ransonnet-Villez himself) in his 1867 book Sketches of the Inhabitants, Animal Life and Vegetation in the Lowlands and High Mountains of Ceylon: As Well as of the Submarine Scenery near the Coast Taken from a Diving Bell, while the paintings themselves, and his correspondence, are mainly in the Natural History Museum Vienna, and in the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Ransonnet-Villez moved on to experiments with colour photography, and with an underwater telescope or reverse periscope, alongside collection and careful observation of samples, for later images of Singapore and the Adriatic. But his underwater images are the most gripping. Jovanovic et al praise them as “a mixture between romantic-lyric underwater-landscapes and super realistic observations of the inhabiting organisms” — a characteristic nineteenth-century intermingling of the aesthetic with the scientific. She also points out his direct influence on Hans Hass, the titan of twentieth-century underwater photography. We might place Ransonnet-Villez in the naturalist tradition, following Philip Henry Gosse, whose The Aquarium of 1854 was a high-water mark in interest in observing marine ecology at close hand. But Ransonnet-Villez deserves special mention for his dedication to conveying the sight and feel of the ocean, his literal immersion in his subject. As he explained of his diving-bell drawing excursions, “one's normal sense of distance and size is completely lost. You soon realize that in the depths of the ocean you need not only learn how to move, but how to see and hear as well.”

public-domain-review

Dec 1, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:24.300635

kaspar-hauser-art

Kaspar Hauser’s Art (1828–1833) Sep 30, 2020 Kaspar Hauser’s appearance in Nuremberg on May 26, 1828, remains an enigma. At first assumed to be a “wild boy” like Victor of Aveyron, Hauser later said he had been raised in a dark cell sleeping on a straw bed and eating nothing but rye bread brought to him by a mysterious man who taught him the rudiments of German. During his lifetime, Hauser was rumored to be of princely parentage — the victim of a complicated royal plot — though modern historians have almost universally agreed he was mentally ill and probably a hoaxster. From 1828 until his death in 1833, Hauser was watched over by various guardians, during which time his story became more and more strange and violent. In October 1829, he claimed to have been cut with a blade by a hooded man who threatened him. In April 1830, he claimed to have accidentally shot himself. Finally, in December 1833, Hauser came home with a deep wound in his chest, claiming he had been stabbed by a stranger who delivered him a coded message. Three days later, he died. The doctors who examined Hauser’s body agreed that the wound may have been self-inflicted; those familiar with Hauser’s style of writing suggested he had written the coded message himself. Today, most people have heard of Hauser. Fewer know Hauser was also a talented artist. “In fact”, James J. Conway writes at Strange Flowers, “the use of drawing and painting to ‘civilize’ the foundling constitutes an early example of art therapy”. The man who encouraged Hauser to draw was Friedrich Daumer, the Nuremberg schoolmaster and philosopher who gave Hauser a home from 1828 to 1829. He was intrigued by the strange mixture of “coarseness” and “culture” Hauser displayed, and was curious to see art Hauser could create, given instruction and materials. Of the surviving artworks created by Hauser range from what appear to be pen-and-ink self-portraits (one apparently done in a trance state) to watercolour studies of fruit and flowers. The latter are extraordinarily precise and quite beautiful. There is also a drawing of coats of arms and another, more sophisticated, of the blade the hooded man of October 1829 used to attack him. In 1832, the legal scholar and patron of Hauser (and critic of his treatment) Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach published Kaspar Hauser: Crimes Against a Man's Soul, the first book to explore the famous case (you can read it here translated into English by Earl Stanhope, another patron of Hauser, though both would end up doubting the boy's story). Amongst the glimpses of Hauser's character and daily existence offered up by Feuerbach, we hear of the young man's obsessive dedication to art making: One of his favourite pursuits next to writing was drawing, for which he shewed as much capacity as perseverance. During several days he had proposed to himself the task of copying a lithographic portrait of the Burgomaster Binder. A large bundle of quarto sheets was entirely filled with these copies, which, in proportion as they were finished, were piled in long succession upon each other. I looked over them, and found that the first attempts were exactly like those of little children who think that they have drawn a face, when they have scrawled on a paper a figure intended to represent an oval, and in it a pair of round holes, with a few perpendicular and cross scratches. But in almost every one of the following attempts some progress was visible, so that these strokes gradually became more similar to a human countenance, and at last represented the original, imperfectly and coarsely, but still in such a manner that the resemblance could be recognized. I expressed to him my approbation of his last attempts, but he did not appear satisfied with them, and gave me to understand that he must still make many copies before one of them was quite like, and he would then give it to the Burgomaster. Another passage describes Hauser’s love for images in general, expressed in a curious daily routine. Kaspar's room was small, but clean and light, and from the window was seen an agreeable and extensive landscape. We found him bare footed, wearing only a shirt and a pair of old pantaloons. The sides of the room, as high as they could be reached, were adorned by him with coloured prints, which he had received as presents from his numerous visitors. Every morning they were fixed by him anew on the walls with his saliva, which was then adhesive like glue ;* and they were removed by him as soon as it was dusk, and laid together near him. (* This saliva was so much like glue, that in removing the prints, pieces of them remained sticking to the walls, or fragments of the plaster adhered to the prints.)

public-domain-review

Sep 30, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:25.197437

maps-of-the-lower-mississippi-harold-fisk

Ancient Courses: Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944) Jul 21, 2020 These eye-catching maps, drawn by Harold Fisk — a geologist and cartographer working for the US Army Corps of Engineers — trace the ever-shifting banks of the Mississippi River from southern Illinois to southern Louisiana. Created to illustrate a rather dry government report on “the nature and origin of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River”, these cartographic marvels give even the untrained a very good sense of what the report calls the “stages in the development” and the present “behavior” of the river system. To put it in plainer English: Fisk dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the Mississippi’s fluctuations through both space and time. Technically speaking, all of these maps represent the lower Mississippi’s “meander belt” — the area of a valley bottom across which the river’s channel has shifted over the millennia. The meander belt of the Mississippi — which has the third largest watershed in the world — is immense. To represent all the water’s many shifts within this belt, Fisk hit on the brilliant idea of using overlapping colors. The current course of the river (current, that is, in 1944) is represented by a mighty blank, punctuated by islands, and crisscrossed by the serpentine green course of 1880, the salmon-pink course of 1820, and the light blue course of 1765. In addition to these relatively recent courses, one can see the color-coded traces of where the river flowed even earlier — a writhing palimpsest of meanders stretching back to prehistoric times. To recreate the course of the river during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Fisk drew on three historical maps (including Lieutenant Ross' influential charting from 1765). For earlier, pre-map eras, Fisk relied on aerial photography and geological study of the terrain, creating a truly extraordinary picture of the Mississippi’s long, deep history. The blogger Jason Kottke beautifully evokes how these maps visualize the river’s long history, representing thousands of years of course changes compressed into a single image by a clever mapmaker with an artistic eye. Looking at them, you're invited to imagine the Mississippi as it was during the European exploration of the Americas in the 1500s, during the Cahokia civilization in the 1200s (when this city's population matched London's), when the first humans came upon the river more than 12,000 years ago, and even back to before humans, when mammoths, camels, dire wolves, and giant beavers roamed the land and gazed upon the river. The changes the Mississippi’s course has undergone since 1765 are especially striking. Many of these are attributable to the work of European settlers: new courses dug, logjams cleared, floodgate systems installed. In the late nineteenth century, extreme deforestation led the river town of Kaskaskia, Illinois, to be flooded and permanently separated from the rest of the state that it had once served as capital. A river, however, as anyone who’s ever lived near one knows, always has a mind of its own. Floods and sudden changes of course (known as avulsions) have also played havoc on the land. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, in 1876, the Mississippi abandoned its old channel on one side of Reverie, Tennessee, and started running on the other, cutting the town off from its old state and connecting it to dry land in Arkansas. All of these alterations, both human and nonhuman, can be seen in Fisk’s wonderfully detailed, wonderfully vibrant maps — further evidence that the Mississippi, as Mark Twain put it, is not at all “a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable”.

public-domain-review

Jul 21, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:25.677693

theatre-of-the-hindus

Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (1827) Jun 10, 2020 In Horace Hayman Wilson's two-volume (and fusty-titled) Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus you'll find, in their first English translations, several major Sanskrit plays, including Shudraka’s Mṛcchakatika (The Toy Cart), Kalidasa’s Vikramōrvaśīyam (Vikrama and Ursavi, or the Hero and the Nymph), and Bhavabhuti’s Malamitmadhava (Málati and Mádhava, or the Stolen Marriage). These plays were not all written in the same era, nor are they much alike in form or content. It’s the equivalent of an Anglophone drama anthology in which Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, and Samuel Beckett all rub shoulders. Or, rather, it’s the equivalent of such an anthology if we put aside the unignorably colonialist expression of Wilson’s intention “to secure the Hindu Theatre a place in English literature” — as though Hindu Theatre, like India as a whole, were to be absorbed, amoeba-like, into the English world. The book even sports a dedication to King George "patron of oriental literature" (whatever that may mean), and a stated purpose "to familiarise his British subjects with the manners and feelings of their fellow subjects in the East". On the face of it this may seem a genuine attempt at understanding and empathy, but carries with it a darker undertone — to familiarise so as to better control. That said, Select Specimens remains an accessible introduction to a part of history still little known by Western readers. Wilson — the first Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford — provides plentiful information about the composition and cultural background of each of the dramas, which he translates with tremendous nineteenth-century fluency, making truly excellent use of every English idiom from “alas!” to “zounds!”. And he even includes short accounts of twenty-three other dramas (some of which have still not been translated into English). Of the three modes of dramatic representation in Sanskrit — Nátya, Nritya, and Nritta — Wilson’s specimens are, he tells us, all of Nátya, “being defined to be gesticulation with language”, whereas the Nritya “is gesticulation without language, or pantomime; and the Nritta is simple dancing”. Most of Wilson’s specimen dramas are love stories with byzantine plots. The Toy Cart — a fifth-century comedy about a love triangle involving a poor young Brahmin, a courtesan, and the vulgar courtier who interferes with their affair — is full of outrageous humor and melodrama that have made for several successful Western adaptations (including one by the French poet Gérard de Nerval). The fourth-century Vikrama and Ursavi, or the Hero and the Nymph is, as the subtitle suggests, also the story of a difficult love affair — this one between the king Pururavas and the celestial nymph Ursavi. (The Vikrama of the title does not refer to a character, as one might think, but means “valor”.) The eighth-century Málati and Mádhava, or the Stolen Marriage features perhaps the most outlandish plot, involving both sorcery and human sacrifice.

public-domain-review

Jun 10, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:26.178488

history-and-antiquities-of-eyam

William Wood’s The History and Antiquities of Eyam (1848) Jun 24, 2020 The small English village of Eyam has popped up periodically in the news of the last few months, but the behavior of its inhabitants during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1665–1666 has long been remembered as an example of a community sacrificing for the greater good. When the plague reached the small Derbyshire town, carried from London (which was then in the grips of the Great Plague) in a box full of tailor’s cloth patterns, legend has it that the people of Eyam quickly and voluntarily decided to isolate themselves to keep the disease from spreading further through the north of England. Until the outbreak had passed in the fall of 1666 —by which point 259 of Eyam’s 330 residents had died — they maintained a self-imposed cordon sanitaire, preventing people from entering or leaving the village and thereby successfully containing the plague. As has been pointed out by Patrick Wallis among others, there is no clear evidence the village of Eyam chose to quarantine itself: None of the original sources... mentions the village choosing its own quarantine. They instead note the success of that isolation and the leadership it demanded. That is not surprising, from the perspective of the period. By the 1660s quarantine was a well-established public health technique, but it was something enforced by the state, not enacted by public-spirited communities — in part because, for some, the temptation to break out was always too strong. Indeed, there appears to be evidence that at the outset of the outbreak some wealthier residents of Eyam fled, erecting new houses in neighbouring valleys, or had their children sent away (as did village leader Reverend Mompesson himself). The romanticised story of Eyam’s self-isolation appears to have first been enshrined by the eighteenth-century poet and Eyam-resident Anna Seward and later reinforced by William Wood’s 1848 book The History and Antiquities of Eyam — with its “minute account of the great plague, which desolated that village in the year 1666”. It was Wood, in keeping with the Victorian habit of championing the stoicism of strong leaders, who made saints of the Reverend Thomas Stanley and the Reverend William Mompesson — two clerics in Eyam whose “magnanimous conduct” (the decision to contain the plague within the village) he credited with “the salvation of the surrounding country”. And it was the popularity of Wood’s book that helped lead to the official recognition of the heroism of the townspeople with annual memorial services and plaques placed on house fronts, rather arbitrarily it seems, commemorating where the victims had once lived. None of this suggests, of course, that the people of Eyam were unheroic or that they did not, under their own steam, take measures to prevent the plague from spreading. Wood’s The Histories and Antiquities of Eyam contains enough quotations from eyewitnesses to suggest that the townspeople acted bravely and that Stanley and Mompesson were compassionate leaders. “The condition of the place has been so sad”, Mompesson writes in a letter written not long after the plague had passed, “that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example”. But what one sees above all in Wood’s pages is the appeal of what are very likely myths, such as the ballad-like story of a girl called Emmot and her fiancé, “a youth named Rowland, who resided in Middleton Dale, about a mile south-east of Eyam” — and who had to stop visiting Emmot once Eyam closed itself off. As one might expect, Emmot is eventually stricken by the plague, though it’s many months before poor Rowland, who’s had to stay away from the village, learns of her death. “Rowland wept as he left the tenantless dwelling”, Wood writes; “his dreadful apprehensions were verified; and until death closed his eyes at a great age, he frequently dropped a tear to the memory of his once lovely Emmot”. The idea that a small community would, inspired by its right-minded leaders, draw a circle around itself “marked by particular and well-known stones and hills; beyond which it was solemnly agreed that no one of the villagers should proceed, whether infected or not”, as Wood memorably describes the making of the cordon sanitaire, is powerful. Whether or not the cordon was self-generated, or imposed by outside forces — or, as seems most likely, a combination of the two — Eyam’s history speaks directly and saliently to our situation today.

public-domain-review

Jun 24, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:26.639457

old-english-customs

Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time (1896) May 19, 2020 Some of the old English customs that Peter Hempson Ditchfield describes in this fascinating late Victorian book are still familiar today. Carols and plum pudding for Christmas, hot cross buns on Good Friday, the maypole on May Day remain familiar features, if not of common English experience, at least of nostalgic imagination. But many other customs will be completely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. Ditchfield’s description of the Christmastime tradition of “the Claire” — practiced in Burghead, Elgin — would be thought of as magic realism if found in a contemporary novel: The seamen... meet at the west end of the town, carrying an old barrel, which they proceed to saw in two. The lower half is then nailed to a long spoke of firewood, which serves as a handle. The half barrel is then filled with dry wood saturated with tar, and built up like a pyramid, leaving a hollow to receive a burning peat. Should the bearer stumble or fall, the consequences would be unlucky to the town and to himself. The Claire is thrown down the western side of the hill, and a scramble ensues for the burning brands, which bring good luck, and are carried home and carefully preserved till the following year as a safeguard against all manner of ills. The book abounds with similarly intriguing snippets of local lore and tradition. On Valentine’s Day, in East Anglia, we learn “it is customary to leave small presents on the doorstep, to ring the bell violently, and then run away”. In Yorkshire, “it is customary after a death to send to the friends of the family a bag of biscuits, together with a card bearing the name of the deceased”. On the Isle of Man, “according to custom, the laws of the island are read publicly on the Tynwald Hill once every year in Manx and in English”. Ritual violence, mischief, and penalty fees play a major role in old British customs. During harvest-time in certain parts of Scotland, anyone who visits the harvest field and does not pay “head money” is “lifted up by his or her ankles and armpits, and the lower part of his person is brought into violent contact with the ground”. Butchers “in some few places keep up the custom of serenading a newly married couple of their own trade with the ‘marrow bones and cleavers’” until they are paid a fee to depart. Some of the more violent customs are not at all charming, and one could not be happier to think they have passed from the earth — above all, perhaps, the ritual stoning of wrens on St. Stephen’s Day. Most of the customs Ditchfield records are rural — from the “obscure nooks and corners of our native land”. But a few old traditions were still lingering on in turn-of-the-century English cities, such as the strange and remarkable municipal custom at Huntingdon, where “the whole of the freemen of the borough assemble in the market-place on the morning of September 15th.” The skull of an ox, borne on two poles, is placed at the head of a procession composed of the freemen and their sons, a certain number of them bearing spades and sticks. Three cheers having been given, the procession moves out of the town, and proceeds to the nearest point of the borough boundary, where the skull is lowered. The procession then moves along the boundary-line of the borough, the skull being dragged along the line as if it were a plough. The boundary-holes are dug afresh, and a boy thrown into each hole and struck with a spade. At a particular point called Blackstone Leys refreshments are provided, and the boys compete for prizes. The skull is then raised aloft, and the procession returns to the market-place, and then disperses after three more cheers have been given. Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time is a wonderful resource for learning about Britain’s bygone local practices. It’s also a useful book for learning about the roots of some of these practices, including those that have persisted. Who knew that those “hot cross buns” so many of us were taught to sing about as children had their origins in the Roman practice of dividing their “sacred cakes with lines intersecting each other at right angles”, which they then presented to the gods? When the inhabitants of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire — a part of England crisscrossed by Roman roads — became Christians, they reinterpreted the old custom and adapted it to new purposes. And so it goes.

public-domain-review

May 19, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:27.081145

nonsenseorship

Nonsenseorship (1922) Sep 8, 2020 In this “levititious literary escapade” — as publisher George P. Putnam describes his anthology — some of the wittiest writers of the Jazz Age lambaste the often nonsensically censorious atmosphere of prohibition-era America. In short pieces of prose and verse, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, and Wallace Irwin (among others) protest the “prohibitions, inhibitions, and illegalities” in a nation then subject not only to Prohibition (which banned alcoholic beverages from 1920 until 1933) but also to the first rumblings of what would become the Motion Picture Production Code (which restricted depictions of sex in Hollywood movies from the 1920s until the 1960s) as well as other forms of censorship covering everything from radio broadcasts to “food... politics, baseball, diversion, [and] dress”. This list is borrowed from Hecht (1893–1964) — the legendary screenwriter responsible for Scarface, His Girl Friday, and other cinematic classics. You will find no sympathy here for censors. “Their viewpoint is already amply set forth”, Putnam justly says: “Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.” Fortunately for us, most of the writers here remain amusing even a century later. The sheer absurdity of what was considered outrageous in the early 1920s struck them then as being just as absurd as it seems to us today. “The sight of a woman making baby clothes is not generally considered a vicious spectacle in many communities”, the journalist Heywood Broun writes with restrained frustration, “but it may not be shown on the screen in Pennsylvania by order of the state board of censors”. Ample proof, to Broun’s way of thinking, that a censor is a person who “believes he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand”. Dorothy Parker, in her wonderfully unrestrained poem, “Reformers: A Hymn of Hate”, gives us some idea of how rapidly the proscriptions of the 1920s set thinking people’s blood to boiling. She begins with the prohibitionists, who can prove that the Johnstown flood,And the blizzard of 1888,And the destruction of PompeiiWere all due to alcohol. But she soon moves on to the movie censors: he motion picture is still in its infancy,—They are the boys who keep it there.If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford’s hand,They cut out the sceneAnd burn it in the public square. And she saves no small amount of scorn for “the All-American Crabs”, “The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything” and are forever signing petitionsUrging that cigarette-smokers should be deported, And that all places of amusement should be closed on SundaysAnd kept closed all week.They take everything personally;They go about shaking their heads,And sighing, “It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong”... Some of the most interesting arguments here are made by the feminist journalist Ruth Hale in her short essay “The Woman’s Place,” which proposes that women have a great deal to teach men about “how to live under prohibitions and taboos”: If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paternalized as the world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it. Another feminist journalist, Helen Bullitt Lowry, points out — in her tribute to the “Uninhibited Flapper” — the paradoxical attractiveness of all prohibition, whether it concerns a word or an alcoholic drink. “Vice would die out from disuse”, she quips, “if the reformers did not advertise”. Nonsenseorship is an enduringly entertaining volume, well worth browsing not only for its many quotable lines but for the charming illustrations by Ralph Barton.

public-domain-review

Sep 8, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:27.419192

herbert-geddes-life-in-japan

Herbert Geddes’ “Life in Japan” Collection: Hand-Coloured Glass Transparencies of the Meiji-Era Oct 6, 2020 These glass-plate transparencies depicting life in Japan, likely the work of a number of photographers (names unknown), were collected in Yokohama during the years 1908–1918 by Herbert Geddes, a manager for a Canadian import-export company. According to the University of Victoria, where the plates are housed, such photographs (known as "Yokohama Photographs") were “sold to foreign tourists between about 1869 and 1912, before cameras and postcards were generally available”. The subjects here range from what we would still associate with art aimed at tourists (temples, bridges, urban streets) to now less common images of labor (including silk factories, rice cultivation, and blacksmithing — not to mention the many women and girls carrying babies on their backs) — providing an intimate view into a largely bygone world. Positive glass transparencies such as these were made directly from glass negatives (which were commonly used before the introduction of photographic film). As the photography historian Kim Timby writes, “When a glass negative was contact-printed to create a glass positive, none of the transparency and precision provided by the glass support were lost. No paper fibers absorbed solutions at any stage or left their trace during printing.” The resulting images were crystal clear, and could be projected through “magic lanterns” to allow people to experience photographs at an impressive scale. There was also something about the use of glass, so Timby writes, that appealed to a modern aesthetic: “It called to mind the exactness of lenses and prisms, the science of vision, the light and transparency of greenhouses, and the covered arcades and shop windows of modern urban life.” As with photographic prints, glass transparencies were often hand-colored, a practice which during the Meiji Period (1868–1912) became more popular in Japan than it ever was in Europe or America. As photographs gradually replaced ukiyo-e prints on the marketplace, printmakers found themselves out of work — and so turned their skilled hands to coloring the competition. The luminous effect of such coloring on glass, such as in Geddes' collection, are particularly stunning. The depth of field in some of the images, combined with the artists’ attentive shading and sense of tone, make it seem they could have been taken yesterday on color film. Browse a selection from the collection, complete with captions, below.

public-domain-review

Oct 6, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:27.925370

sylvestre-alphabet-album

Joseph-Balthazar Sylvestre’s Alphabet Album (1843) Sep 16, 2020 This “alphabet album”, a beautiful book of calligraphy and typographic engraving, was assembled by Joseph-Balthazar Silvestre (1791–1869), a paleographer, calligrapher, and miniaturist painter born in Avignon who later taught the sons of King Louis-Philippe I (1773–1850) how to form their letters. Ranging from the old-fashioned to the modern, from the elegantly unreadable to the crystal clear, these alphabets are organized and labeled by century, country, and often library of origin, thereby providing the reader with a sense of how many different variations people have made on the simple shapes of Roman letters over the millennia. Although presenting historical script up to Silvestre's modern-day of the 1840s, the casual viewer might be forgiven for thinking that Silvestre may have somehow plucked a couple of alphabets from the future as well. For those of us not well versed in the history of type, there's something oddly 20th-century about some of the forms — a reminder that type associated with particular eras is often "retrieved" from times past. Another highlight is a beautiful script entirely comprised of gnarled tree-forms, a medium given added salience in this volume given the sylvan name of its compiler. Browse some of our favourites below, and please forgive the low resolution (which is the highest we could find).

public-domain-review

Sep 16, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:28.387117

observations-on-street-nuisances-charles-babbage

Charles Babbage’s Observations on Street Nuisances (1864) Oct 1, 2020 Many people know that the English polymath Charles Babbage, with the assistance of Ada Lovelace, invented the first mechanical computer. Fewer people know how much he hated street noise, especially the music made by musicians in London: It robs the industrious man of his time; it annoys the musical man by its intolerable badness; it irritates the invalid; deprives the patient, who at great inconvenience has visited London for the best medical advice, of that repose which, under such circumstances, is essential for his recovery, and it destroys the time and the energies of all the intellectual classes of society by its continual interruptions of their pursuits. In a chapter excerpted from his autobiographical work The Life of a Philosopher, Babbage rails at length against the “instruments of torture permitted by the Government to be in daily and nightly use in the streets of London” — including “the human voice in various forms”. What Babbage intends to be a call for legal reform sometimes reads more like a satirical text by Swift or Beckett: The amount of interruption from street music, and from other occasional noises, varies with the nature and the habits of its victims. Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied receive it with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum of time. Those whose thoughts are chiefly occupied with frivolous pursuits or with any other pursuits requiring but little attention from the reasoning or the reflective powers, readily attend to occasional street music. Those who possess an impaired bodily frame, and whose misery might be alleviated by good music at proper intervals, are absolutely driven to distraction by the vile and discordant music of the streets waking them, at all hours… To illustrate the need for noise laws, Babbage tells a number of anecdotes. One involves an artist in the West End who, disturbed by the “continuous sound of music transmitted through the wall from his neighbour’s house”, orders his servant to hit the wall with a hammer repeatedly while he goes for an hour-long walk in the park. This retaliation leads to a temporary solution. The musical neighbor agrees to move his piano and drape it with blankets. However, his piano students don’t like playing on a “dumb piano” and abandon their professor, “who found it desirable to give up the house and retire to a more music-tolerating neighbourhood”. Other anecdotes Babbage tells — about fatal carriage accidents caused by horses who’ve been startled by brass bands, about the distress caused to housebound invalids — are less amusing. In fact, Babbage’s sensitivity to “noise pollution” may be as prescient as his invention of an early computer. “Among environmental hazards to human health”, George Prochnik writes in a New York Times op-ed, “only air pollution causes more damage”. Babbage’s tone is often hilarious. He himself acknowledges that not everyone shares his solemn dislike of street music. “I was once asked by an astute and sarcastic magistrate whether I seriously believed that a man’s brain would be injured by listening to an organ.” His reply? “Certainly not, for the obvious reason that no man having brain ever listened to street musicians.” In this judgement, Babbage shows himself to have a good deal in common with his misophonic contemporary Schopenhauer, who writes in The World as Will: Actually, I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to their mental powers, and can therefore be regarded as a rough measure of them. When I therefore hear dogs barking hour upon hour unrestrained in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the mental powers of the inhabitants. Whoever habitually slams doors rather than closing them by hand, or allows this happen in their house, is not merely ill-mannered, but a crude and obtuse person. If you've interest in seeing the grey matter that got so enraged by street noise (and that imagined the first mechanical computer) then check out our post on images of Charles Babbage's brain.

public-domain-review

Oct 1, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:28.912826

frederick-douglass-fourth-july-speech

First Edition Pamphlet of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” (1852) Text by Adam Green Jul 4, 2020 The 4th of July Address, delivered in Corinthian Hall, by Frederick Douglass, is published on good paper, and makes a neat pamphlet of forty pages. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred. So ran an advertisement in Frederick Douglass' Paper (originally the North Star), a week after the famed abolitionist and orator had, on July 5th, 1852, stood before a packed Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, and delivered one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States. In addition to its masterful use of rhetoric and other oratory techniques since studied in classrooms throughout the US, the speech is memorable for casting a searing spotlight on the nation’s hypocrisy of celebrating liberation while also denying the liberty of millions through a vast and brutal regime of slavery. Upon finishing his speech to the six hundred or so mostly white abolitionists, Douglas was met with “a universal burst of applause” and seven hundred copies of the above-featured pamphlet were subscribed to on the spot. While the pamphlet bears the rather stiff title Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester by Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852, Douglass’ anti-slavery speech is now known widely as "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?". This arresting appellation — which first appeared a few years later as title to an excerpt printed in Douglass' 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom — is a variation on the piercing question so central to the speech: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” It's perhaps a shame that the question, in its repackaged form as a title, suffered the loss of that salient “your”. This simple possessive determiner carries a significance which runs to the very heart of Douglass' message — that this day celebrating liberty could never be for Douglass and his fellow Black Americans as long as slavery existed (“This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn”). As he goes on to powerfully reply: I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. This critical stance toward the Fourth of July had long been shared by Black Americans — a date to "mourn", not "rejoice" — and it was, in fact, the following day of the fifth that became important, at least for New Yorkers, celebrating as it did the full abolishment of slavery in their state in 1827. Legislators had in fact chosen the date of July 4 for the decree to take effect and with this choice likely had noble intentions — an attempt to foster some sense of now “shared” liberty perhaps — but the sad realities of persisting racial prejudice and violence would temper this idealistic and somewhat naive vision. As the New York Times notes, when debating how to celebrate the historic day Black New Yorkers worried, in addition to the hypocrisy inherent in the fourth, that a parade down Broadway on that date would be met with violence — “white revelers often attacked blacks on public holidays”. And so the day after was chosen for the celebration and on July 5, 1827, four thousand Black New Yorkers marched along Broadway, and celebrations held as far away as Boston and Philadelphia. Holding celebrations on the fifth instead of the fourth became common among Black communities (amongst those that were not still enslaved, of course). As Peter Osborne declared to the congregation at the New Haven African Church in Connecticut on July 5, 1832: “On account of the misfortune of our color, our fourth of July comes on the fifth; but I hope and trust that when the Declaration of Independence is fully executed, which declared that all men, without respect to person, were born free and equal, we may then have our fourth of July on the fourth.” Douglass’ famous speech was, of course, also given on the fifth. Most sources agree that Douglass refused an invitation from the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to speak on the fourth, and insisted on the fifth instead. A few other sources state that actually the whole celebration had been moved to the fifth due to the fourth falling on a Sunday (the “Lord’s Day”) — a reason given by the Society themselves in an announcement in Douglass' paper, though it is quite possible this excuse was after the fact and that they moved the whole day of celebrations to work around the prized speaker's wishes. (Some confusion may have also been sown by the existence of a letter dated June 26 in which Douglass states that he'd "secured Corinthian Hall for the morning of the 4th" — but an initial assumption it was from the year 1852 has since been questioned: Douglass was a frequent speaker at the Hall). Whatever the reason for this date of the fifth, it remains a powerful fact that one of the most important speeches on American freedom and liberty, centring on the meaning of the Fourth of July celebrations, was so subtly out of synch with that so hallowed date — a powerful metaphor for a freedom delayed. Coming as it did in the wake of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (which required citizens of free states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves), the debate stirred up by Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin (published just a few months before), and it being an election year, it seems Douglass was aware of the potential far-reaching impact of the Corinthian Hall event. A prolific speechwriter, Douglass appears to have poured extra effort into this one. Writing to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith two days later Douglass stated that the writing of the speech had “taken up much of my extra time for the last two or three weeks. You will readily think that the Speech ought to be good that has required so much time. Well, Some here think (it) was a good Speech.” In writing the speech Douglass will have had in mind the printed version, and his words reaching beyond the room of abolitionists. In addition to the pamphlets that were printed and distributed, the oration was also published a few days later on July 9th in Frederick Douglass' Paper under the headline “The Celebration at Corinthian Hall”. Later that year, Douglass would go on to publish "The Heroic Slave" (as part of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society's anthology Autographs of Freedom), his first and only published work of fiction. Nine years later, the American Civil War would begin, and four years after that the eventual end of slavery in the US, or at least in its explicit chattel form — (for a fascinating study into how the institution of slavery in the US has been perpetuated beyond 1865, we highly recommend Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13TH). You can read a plain text transcript of Douglass' full speech at the Rochester University site here, in addition to his other writings. You can also browse a collection of Douglass' speeches (and correspondence) at the great Frederick Douglass Papers Digital Edition project.

public-domain-review

Jul 4, 2020

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:29.391414

roger-fenton-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death

Of Chickens, Eggs, and Cannonballs: Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) Text by Adam Green Sep 1, 2020 This image, taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War in 1855, is one of the earliest photographic records of warfare. It's also widely considered one of the first "faked" photographs (in which the content has been manipulated with the aim of conveying a different reality as to that which took place). Known as Valley of the Shadow of Death the photograph shows a desolate scene littered with cannonballs, some populating a ditch and some scattered along a stretch of road. It is an arresting image — somehow managing to evoke at once the heavy throes of mid-battle and the eery calm of a body-strewn aftermath. This famous image is, in fact, one of a pair — both taken by Fenton on the same day, from the same position, of the very same vista. The difference between them? The less famous version has no cannonballs on the road — they are all in the ditch instead. To those so inclined, this spot-the-difference scenario presents an intriguing question — which photograph (if either) is of the scene Fenton actually encountered? Which one was taken first? Many have assumed that the cannonballs-on-road image is the second one, that Fenton staged the photograph by moving the cannonballs from their original place in the ditch onto the road for dramatic effect. The German art historian Ulrich Keller was one of the first to advance this theory, which Susan Sontag later accepted as gospel in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, where she writes: Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title it was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture — the one that is always reproduced — he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself. After reading this passage, the relentlessly truth-loving documentary filmmaker Errol Morris became obsessed with determining whether it was indeed true that Fenton staged the picture — and in 2007 published his extensive explorations in an epic three-part New York Times piece called “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?”. His conviction that “nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious” led him to interview several historians (including Keller), half of whom agreed that Fenton staged the photograph and half of whom thought the cannonballs on the road was how the scene presented itself, with the clear road photograph the result of soldiers later moving the cannonballs to recycle them for future battles. Morris, still unsatisfied, then traveled to the exact spot in the Sevastopol, borrowed some cannonballs, and, after doing some staging of his own, tried to determine the chronology by studying the angle of light (all to no avail). Only with the eagle eyes of Dennis Purcell — an optical engineer who noticed that a group of five small rocks on the left slope were positioned in a lower position in the photograph with the cannonballs on the road — was Morris able to determine, seemingly beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Keller and Sontag were correct. Acknowledging it extremely unlikely that these five rocks — which Purcell nicknamed Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke — somehow moved up the hill, Morris and Purcell came to the conclusion that the rocks had moved down the hill (such is the way of gravity and rocks on a slope) and so this photograph showing the rocks in a lower position (the one with the cannonballs in the road) was taken second. When Fenton and his assistant walked around the scene to stage the cannonballs in the road, they dislodged these rocks and they fell downwards. Thus the photograph was staged. While Morris' investigations show that it's extremely likely Fenton staged the photograph by placing cannonballs in the road, whether it was Fenton’s intention to actively “fool” viewers remains debatable. Did Fenton even have such a clearcut conception of what it would be to fool viewers? After all, by contemporary standards, it could be argued that almost every ostensibly documentary photograph taken in the 1850s was staged. The size and nature of Fenton’s photographic equipment meant he could only capture stationary objects, landscapes, and posed people. Indeed, for this reason and related safety concerns, Valley of the Shadow of Death wasn’t taken in the valley where the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade occurred but several miles away. (The title itself —a phrase from Psalm 23 used by British troops before being taken up by Tennyson — was subsequently imposed by the publisher and gallerist Thomas Agnew, who displayed Fenton’s photograph as part of a series entitled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts.) Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death was produced some eighty years before Robert Capa's Falling Soldier, at a time when, it could be argued, such staging was written into the very practicalities of the medium, a medium which in its early days was much closer to painting than it is now. Might what we see as inauthentic staging instead be seen as working within limitations to produce something actually more authentic, that reflected more truthfully the throes of battle in which Fenton and his over-sized equipment could not be fully immersed as could Capa? Or more simply, might Fenton have witnessed soldiers clearing the road of cannonballs and merely recreated it as he'd first encountered it? Are not all photographs in some way staged? All interesting questions. For more on such things we highly recommend Morris' Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (2011), which includes his New York Times piece on Fenton as well as a few other similar essays on other documentary photographs through history. You can also listen to Morris talking about his obsession with this photograph in an episode of Radiolab from 2012.

public-domain-review

Sep 1, 2020

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:29.878050

erbario-15th-century-herbal

Erbario: a 15th-century Herbal from Northern Italy May 12, 2020 This wonderful 15th-century herbal hails from northern Italy (mostly likely the Veneto) and contains a few different kinds of illustration styles, evidence of a series of augmentations to the manuscript made across several generations. It started life out in the early fifteenth century as a set of around seventy highly stylised paintings of plants, whose patterns, human faces, and other fantastical elements broadly follow medieval conventions (in particular the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal tradition). Sometime later in the century, as Karen M. Reeds writes “the bound manuscript of 100 folios was, in effect, interleaved”: watercolors of still more plants were painted on many of the versos and on both sides of the folios previously left blank. At the same time, labels and some herbal texts in Italian, written mostly in sepia ink, were added. In technique, in descriptive detail, and choice of colors, these watercolor illustrations contrast strongly with the Pseudo-Apuleius figures on the facing rectos... Among this second set is a subset of markedly more naturalistic images, perhaps painted directly from specimens, or at least very good drawings. Finally, at the very end of the manuscript is a “nature print” of a single leaf labeled Salvia salvaticha, with the handwriting of its note indicating it was done by this same person behind the second set of additions (see final image below). It’s the original set — with its anthropomorphised vegetation and dragon-shaped roots — which we’ve been mostly drawn to in our highlights below, but you can have a look at the original on the Penn Libraries site (Ms. LJS 419) to get a sense of the full range of interleaved styles in this remarkable manuscript.

public-domain-review

May 12, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:30.353934

sadakichi-hartmann-conversations-with-walt-whitman

Sadakichi Hartmann’s Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895) Oct 21, 2020 In 1873, when he was fifty-three years old, Walt Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. Within months, he moved from Washington, DC, where he’d been living since the Civil War, to his brother’s house in Camden, New Jersey. This was the house where Whitman would receive Oscar Wilde, during Wilde’s tour of America, and where he would first get to know the American painter Thomas Eakins, who both painted and photographed the poet in his final years. In 1884, Whitman moved less than a mile away to his own home on Mickle Street in Camden, where he would live until his death eight years later. Although bedridden for most of his time on Mickle Street, he continued to revise Leaves of Grass until the end (publishing the last edition of his lifetime in 1889 and working on another even on his deathbed) and to receive visitors, including Eakins; Horace Traubel, author of the nine-volume Boswellian biography Walt Whitman in Camden); and Sadakichi Hartmann, author of the lesser-known, much shorter biographical recollection Conversations with Whitman, which are touchingly dedicated to “Artist Thomas Eakins, of Philadelphia, as an Admirer of Walt Whitman, in his own Native Independence, Simplicity and Force, without Crankiness and Subserviency.” Hartmann led a truly extraordinary life. He was born in 1867 to a Japanese mother and a German father on the artificial island of Dejima (originally built in 1634 to house Portuguese traders who were legally barred from setting foot in Japan). After a childhood spent mostly in Germany, he moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1882, at age fourteen, and paid his first visit to Whitman only two years later, crossing the bridge over the Delaware River from Philadelphia to Camden on “a disagreeable day” with “snow lying on the ground, and though it was thawing, the wind felt cold as it sped through the streets and rattled at the shutters”. Hartmann continues: An old man with a long grey beard, flowing over his open shirt front — the first thing I actually saw of Whitman was his naked breast — half opened the door and looked out.    SADAKICHI: “I would like to see Walt Whitman.”    WHITMAN: “That’s my name. And you are a Japanese boy, are you not?” (Except very small boys the only person I met in those years who recognized my nationality at the first glance.)    SADAKICHI: “My father is a German, but my mother was a Japanese and I was born in Japan.”    WHITMAN: “H’m — Come in.” And so Hartmann does, all the while taking in the details the “small and humbled two windowed little parlor” which was “a varitable [sic] sea of newspapers, books, magazines, circulars, rejected manuscripts, etc.” and noting the “healthy manliness” of Whitman’s face. Conversations with Whitman is full of such striking details — and full, of course, of Whitman’s memorable way of talking. The earnestness of the young Hartmann brings out Whitman’s boldest optimism. He says such things as: “Americans are allowed to be different. The theory of our government is to give to every man the freedom of his activity — to work, study, electrify” and (this while “frying several eggs” on the stovetop in preparation for a meal that also involves California claret and lobster): “The American nation is not much at present, but will be some day the most glorious one on earth. At first the cooking must be done, the table set, before one can sit down to a square meal. We are now tuning the instruments, afterwards comes the music.” In the touching final encounter between the dying Whitman and Hartmann, who has brought his wife to meet him, they talk about more ordinary things. When Whitman’s midday meal is carried in, Hartmann says they had better go. “I hope you will soon feel better”. To which Whitman replies, optimistically as ever: “It is clouded now, possibly, it’ll pass by”. Whitman was among the first, but far from the last, famous men with whom Hartmann came into contact. He would later befriend Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Ezra Pound. He would write for Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, compose a two-volume History of American Art, and be crowned King of the Bohemians of Greenwich Village by the eccentric impresario Guido Bruno. He also penned some of the earliest English-language haiku, put on the first “symphony of smells” (a performance consisting entirely of perfumes) in San Francisco in 1919, and had a minor role as a magician in the swashbuckler film The Thief of Bagdad (1925). Narrowly avoiding being incarcerated during the mass internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Hartmann lived the last years of his life in southern California and died while visiting one of his daughters in St. Petersburg, Florida. His legacy may have faded, but he remains a fascinating figure, best remembered for his avant-garde attitudes and, as Luc Sante puts it in Low Life, his “prescient theoretical writings on photography”.

public-domain-review

Oct 21, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:30.854424

filippo-buonanni-harmonic-cabinet

Filippo Buonanni’s Harmonic Cabinet (1722) Text by Melissa McCarthy Oct 13, 2020 The German polymath and Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher had a lifelong fascination with sound and devoted two books to the subject: Musurgia Universalis (1650), on the theoretical (and theological) aspects, and Phonurgia Nova (1673), on the science of acoustics and its practical applications. It's no surprise then to learn that his famed museum at Rome's Collegio Romano boasted— in addition to “vomiting statues”, ghost-conjuring mirrors, and other curious wonders — a vast and diverse collection of musical instruments. Much of what we know of Kircher's museum today is thanks to his student and fellow Jesuit priest Filippo Buonanni (1638-1725), who succeeded Kircher as both Professor of Mathematics and, upon Kircher's death, as chief custodian of the museum for which he produced an epic and exhaustive, near-800-page catalogue in 1709. Following in his master's footsteps, Buonanni too held a dizzying array of interests and specialisms including numismatics, microscopy, spontaneous generation, Chinese laquer, seashells (on which he produced the first monograph), and also, like Kircher, music. Inspired by the collection of instruments in Kircher's wunderkammer, and intrigued by the stories behind them, in 1722 Buonanni published his Gabinetto Armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori (or Harmonic cabinet full of sonorous instruments), an attempt to catalogue, for the first time, the musical instruments of the world. While there's a short and often illuminating text for each instrument it is the 152 engraved plates — executed by Flemish artist and publisher Arnold van Westerhout — which really steal the show. The featured instruments are divided into three sections — wind, string, and percussion — and preceded by thirteen brief discussions of other musical categories, including: military, funeral, used in sacrifices, and, intriguingly, as used at sea: not sirens, but chantying sailors. While some of the instruments gathered in Buonanni's book are as simple as the bee-keeper banging his tub, or the clacking of shoes against the floor, some are highly crafted, technical machines; the great organ at Palazzo Verospi requires a fold-out page to show it all. We are also treated to what might be considered more incidental instruments, for example, the bell about a bound criminal's neck and the sound of a soldier's sword being struck. Some of the instruments in their settings seem outlandish; you’ll notice Pan and cherubs among the musicians. Well might they look fantastical, for, as Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson explain in their essay ”Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments”, such instruments as the “Tubo Cochleato” did not yet exist; the Gabinetto lists both actually existing and projected instruments; ones that had been, or should one day be, constructed. As much anthropological as it is encyclopaedic, the book shows not just instruments, but their musicians, too — even women —and as such it fits into the popular tradition of travel writing and catalogues of foreign peoples. In addition to the folk and antiquity traditions of Buonanni's Europe, the Gabinetto covers instruments and musicians from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, often accompanied by details of ethnographic encounters. Readers of sixteenth-century explorers such as John White and Theodore de Bry might find the “Tromba della Florida” familiar, with its depiction of the clothing, hairstyle, and landscape of the musician. Making sense and clarity out of music, peoples, and the world, Buonanni’s Gabinetto can be seen as itself an instrument of harmonious understanding. You can browse our highlights of the engravings below, and also see them in context in a complete scan of the book here.

public-domain-review

Oct 13, 2020

Melissa McCarth

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:31.351592

the-comet-book

The Comet Book (1587) May 28, 2020 This stunning set of images come from a 16th-century treatise on comets, created anonymously in Flanders (now northern France) and now held at the Universitätsbibliothek Kassel. Commonly known as The Comet Book (or Kometenbuch in German), its full title translates as “Comets and their General and Particular Meanings, According to Ptolomeé, Albumasar, Haly, Aliquind and other Astrologers”. As the title (and indeed medieval origins of the book) suggests the focus is on the meaning of comets, the associated folklore and superstitions as played out on Earth, as opposed to an exploration from a scientific standpoint (the telescope would not be invented until the following century). Comets then are seen in terms of their mysterious terrestrial effects, which as a rule firmly occupy the disastrous category ("disaster" being Latin for "bad star") — devastating fires, wrecking winds, bloodshed, pestilence, famines, and a fair few celebrity deaths. As any dinosaur would tell you, the association of comets and meteors with calamitous events are not entirely unfounded — one comet, named here “Veru” (depicted as a fiery lance) and now known as Swift-Tuttle, has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity" (though the chances of it hitting Earth are still extremely small). According to a 1977 article by Jean-Michel Massing, most of The Comet Book's chapters have their origins in an anonymously authored treatise Liber de significatione cometarum [A book on the meaning of comets] made in Spain around 1238. In the fifteenth century this was translated into French, a translation which itself spawned various illustrated abridged versions that same century. It is one of these abridged versions which, a century on, would have provided the basis for The Comet Book, not just for the text but also imagery. The latter however have been spectacularly upgraded. While, according to Massing, the formal depiction of the comets themselves don't change so much, in this 16th-century version they have been pulled from their positions inline with the text and flung into the skies of a series of stunningly coloured full-page landscapes. The stylised depictions of the comets echo the fantastical bent of the text — "Veru" as a lance, "Domina capillorum" as burning wheel, "Rosa" with beaming face, and "Scutella" as some kind of heavenly Asclepius’s staff. In the landscapes below which the comet's stream we see some evidence also of their perceived effects — for example, in the print for "Aurora", which was thought to be an omen of impending conflagrations, a city rages with fire. As the keen observer will note, fiery emissions are not limited only to the skies or burning cities. In the image for "Miles" — whose effects include an upset of social norms — a Bruegel-esque character can be spied defecating in the bottom right corner. This Comet Book is in fact one of two near identical treatises. The second version (now in the Warburg Library in London) is very likely the work of the same scribe and artist, the main difference being that the Warburg copy sports an additional chapter and a slightly different running order for the comets (the result of a mistake when the Kassel copy was bound in 1969). Lastly, for a book about fiery apparitions, it is perhaps not entirely inappropriate to learn that this Kassel copy comes to us today with some heat damage — not from comets but bombs. In September 1941, a hundred allied planes flattened Kassel in a raid in which 350,000 or so (almost 90%) of the State Library’s books and printed materials were destroyed. Thankfully the glorious Comet Book survived. (For more historical depictions of comets — as well as meteors, meteorites, and shooting stars — check out our post "Flowers of the Sky".) Universitätsbibliothek Kassel have made the digitisations of this work available under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.

public-domain-review

May 28, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:31.555996