Physiognomies

The following images are excerpted from Le Brun’s System on Physiognomy by L.-J.-M. Morel d’Arleux (after Charles Le Brun).

Le Brun (1619-1690) was a ‘painter and designer who became the arbiter of artistic production in France during the last half of the 17th century.’. Besides his work on paintings, tapestries and murals for the French court, Le Brun was also interested in the study of physiognomy, the ‘science’ of determining personalities from facial features.

Le Brun’s posthumously-published treatise Methode pour apprendre a dessiner les passions, based on a 1688 lecture, was an attempt to codify the visual expression of the emotions in painting. It was a work that apparently exercised a great influence on European art in the decades that followed. The present works were originally composed for another dissertation on the subject, now lost.

All of these images are taken from the pages of an on-line exhibition at Les Maîtres des Arts Graphiques. Clicking on these thumbnails will open larger, pop-up versions of the same.

Of Things Near and Far

Of things near and far has been this journal’s subtitle almost since its inception, and can currently be seen lurking in the background of the banner image above. The phrase derives from the title of a book of memoirs by a long-time favourite author of mine, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). An interesting essay about Machen’s tale The White People at Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Violet Books site brought his writing back to the forefront of my attention for the first time in quite a while.

It was very dark in the room. He seemed by slow degrees to awake from a long and heavy torpor, from an utter forgetfulness, and as he raised his eyes he could scarcely discern the pale whiteness of the paper on the desk before him. He remembered something of a gloomy winter afternoon, of driving rain, of gusty wind: he had fallen asleep over his work, no doubt, and the night had come down.

Machen began his literary career in the 1880s, as a pasticheur and translator (he translated, among other works, the Memoirs of Casanova), before going on to attain a small measure of notoriety as the author of some luridly melodramatic horror stories, such as The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (published together in 1894). The former tale can be found entire in most Project Gutenberg archives.

He lay back in his chair, wondering whether it were late; his eyes were half closed, and he did not make the effort and rouse himself. He could hear the stormy noise of the wind, and the sound reminded him of the half-forgotten days. He thought of his boyhood, and the old rectory, and the great elms that surrounded it. There was something pleasant in the consciousness that he was still half dreaming; he knew he could wake up whenever he pleased, but for the moment he amused himself by the pretence that he was a little boy again, tired with his rambles and the keen air of the hills. He remembered how he would sometimes wake up in the dark at midnight, and listen sleepily for a moment to the rush of the wind straining and crying amongst the trees, and hear it beat upon the walls, and then he would fall to dreams again, happy in his warm, snug bed.

In much of Machen’:s fiction, the visible world is portrayed as a mere veil thinly stretched over realms beyond of radiant beauty or unspeakable nastiness. This outlook achieved its best expression in the works he wrote ca. 1897-1901, among them what I would consider his best novel The Hill of Dreams (also available on-line, at litrix), an account of a hypersensitive young man’s profound alienation from the material world around him, one which ultimately destroys him. In this book Machen sought to create, as he put it, a Robinson Crusoe of the soul. It is a book which seems more akin to the fragrant flowerings of French symbolism than to the all-too-often stodgily prosaic world of English Victoriana.

The wind grew louder, and the windows rattled. He half opened his eyes and shut them again, determined to cherish that sensation of long ago. He felt tired and heavy with sleep; he imagined that he was exhausted by some effort; he had, perhaps, been writing furiously without rest. He could not recollect at the instant what the work had been; it would be delightful to read the pages when he had made up his mind to bestir himself.

As for Things Near and Far, it was written in the early ’20s, at a time when Machen's work was beginning to enjoy a short-lived vogue. It is an uneven and episodic work, though aptly titled, and most interesting for its account of the period following the death of his first wife in 1899, when, after suffering a kind of breakdown, his grief gave way to a state of bliss, hauntingly described; a time when the world around him seemed charged with strange magic.

Surely that was the noise of boughs, swaying and grinding in the wind. He remembered one night at home when such a sound had roused him suddenly from a deep sweet sleep. There was a rushing and beating as of wings upon the air, and a heavy dreary noise, like thunder far away upon the mountain. He had got out of bed and looked from behind the blind to see what was abroad. He remembered the strange sight he had seen, and he pretended it would be just the same if he cared to look out now. There were clouds flying awfully from before the moon, and a pale light that made the familiar land look strange and terrible. The blast of wind came with a great shriek, and the trees tossed and bowed and quivered; the wood was scourged and horrible, and the night air was ghastly with a confused tumult, and voices as of a host. A huge black cloud rolled across the heaven from the west and covered up the moon, and there came a torrent of bitter hissing rain.

Machen subsequently worked as a stage actor, which he loved, and as a journalist, which he loathed with a cold fury. His books were always lauded by a small few, but generally ignored by the public at large. Wide acclaim and a secure prosperity eluded him. Nevertheless, his works are still cherished, and there was until recently a flourishing Society dedicated to preserving his memory.

It was all a vivid picture to him as he sat in his chair, unwilling to wake. Even as he let his mind stray back to that night of the past years, the rain beat sharply on the window-panes, and though there were no trees in the grey suburban street, he heard distinctly the crash of boughs. He wandered vaguely from thought to thought, groping indistinctly amongst memories, like a man trying to cross from door to door in a darkened unfamiliar room. But, no doubt, if he were to look out, by some magic the whole scene would be displayed before him. He would not see the curve of monotonous two-storied houses, with here and there a white blind, a patch of light, and shadows appearing and vanishing, not the rain plashing in the muddy road, not the amber of the gas-lamp opposite, but the wild moonlight poured on the dearly loved country; far away the dim circle of the hills and woods, and beneath him the tossing trees about the lawn, and the wood heaving under the fury of the wind.

The above quotations are the opening paragraphs of Chapter VII of The Hill of Dreams.

Cookies & Bread

Since Monday afternoon we have been the proud owners of a bright red KitchenAid stand mixer. My wife had spotted it on display in the window at Verner & Verner. It was rather costly but looks to be a sturdy machine that should last us a good long while. My wife recalls that her aunt still has a similar mixer that has been in use for decades. Yesterday evening it was put to the test, first in mixing up a batch of chocolate-chip cookie batter, then later mixing and kneading some bread dough. In both cases, the end results were delicious. After the bread dough had risen just once, my wife took some of it aside, separating it into pieces which she then flattened, and fried in a little butter until brown on both sides. We ate the resulting toutons hot, smeared with more butter, to which tradition-minded types might have added a drooling of molasses: hardly a nutritious snack, but a very satisfying one nevertheless. Later, after the remaining dough had risen again, and had baked, filling the apartment with that singular smell, we each savoured a little crust of it, cheerfully ignoring Mrs. Beeton’s warning:

When bread is taken out of the oven, it is full of moisture; the starch is held together in masses, and the bread, instead of being crusted so as to expose each grain of starch to the saliva, actually prevents their digestion by being formed by the teeth into leathery poreless masses, which lie on the stomach like so many bullets. Bread should always be at least a day old before it is eaten… Hot rolls, swimming in melted butter, and new bread, ought to be carefully shunned by everybody who has the slightest respect for that much-injured organ: the stomach.

Art-Forms in Nature

Here are a few images from Ernst Haeckel’s portfolio Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904), an outstandingly beautiful album of plates emphasising the seemingly artful elegance of natural forms.

Haeckel achieved great fame in his day as a populariser of Darwin’s theories. He was, moreover, one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology, and also proposed many now ubiquitous coinages such as phylum and ecology.

On the other hand, most of Haeckel’s speculative theories were later discredited. Worse, he was a fraud and a racist. Even so, it is surely going too far to say, as at least one creationist site has it, that ‘Haeckel provided the malign influence and pernicious inspiration that were the indirect cause of two world wars and the atrocities of the holocaust.’

The present images are all taken from Kurt Stüber’s site (full Kunstformen index here). I first arrived at this link by way of logodrome.

Birch Twigs

In the latter part of Lent, and towards Easter, it is customary here to decorate bundles of birch twigs with coloured feathers, or painted eggs and the like, and display this påskris in a suitably prominent position in ones household. This year is the first we have observed this tradition. Ours is in a vase on the kitchen table, and is already an object of great fascination for the cats. I read with interest that, in former times:

Easter twigs were used to administer beatings on Good Friday (långfredagen). It was the duty of the master of the house to beat the children and servants with bunches of the twigs, to ensure that they did not forget Christ’s sufferings on the cross. It was to be done while they were still in bed and was practiced until the mid 18th century in many regions.

The weather was glorious over the weekend: fresh and bright and almost warm. The ice over the sea had all but melted, and the water shone implausibly blue under a relevatory sun. I went out for a stroll around town on Saturday morning, buying a glass jug to replace the one I broke last week, a couple of CDs, one of which ‘( )’ by Sigur Rós, I am listening to now, yet another espresso cup and saucer, and a bottle of good olive oil. A little later my wife and I checked out a new out-of-town strip-mall, picking up a few items from a budget homewares store called Rusta. Later we watched Road to Perdition on DVD. There was more shopping on Sunday: an oval mirror, a new bookcase (the other four having all filled up) and three CD/DVD storage towers with a beech finish, very similar to IKEA’s Benno model. We assembled these, and later dined on barbecued pork chops with baked potatoes and some delicious improvised bruschetta. These excursions and chores aside - I did some laundry too - it was one of those weekends when just to be beside my love was the choicest of delights: a comfort and a pleasure and a charm.

Seven Things Beginning with S

An e-mail from Mr. M______, an Iranian colleague of mine, informs me that, according to the Persian calendar, it is New Year’s Eve, and, as of 04:29:45 Tehran time, (or 01:29:45 CET) that the year will be 1382 (by the Khorchid reckoning), or 2562 (by the Shahanshah).

…Nowruz (also spelt No-Ruz and No-Rooz), is the first day of the Iranian solar year, translated literally as New Day. Since the Achaemenid era (12th century BC), the official year has begun with the New Day when the sun leaves the zodiac of Pisces and enters the zodiacal sign of Aries, a fire sign, signifying the Spring Equinox. The moment the sun crosses the equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year and families gather together to observe the rituals. Now Ruz is considered the major civil celebration of the year. Coinciding with March 20th or March 21st, the first day of the first month of Farvardin, brings about a rebirth of nature.

It seems to me that the vernal equinox is an excellent point to usher in a new year, as one can scarcely help but feel reawakened, revivified by the returning tide of light and warmth that this season brings.

Haft Seen is a traditional table decorated with at least seven or Haft symbolic objects, nutrients or plants beginning with the Persian letter s or Seen. Amongst the most popular such items are hyacinth So’n B’ol, red apples Seeb, the spice sumac Som’agh, garlic S’iir, vinegar Serkeh, coins Sekkeh, red dates Senjed, and a dish of germinated wheat or barley seeds Sabzeh. The hyacinth blooms in the springtime, symbolizing the fragrant rebirth of nature. Red apples provide colour as well as representing the First Fruit, from the time of Adam and Eve. Sumac is said to be the spice of life and garlic is believed to chase away evil spirits. Vinegar is a symbol of fermentation, having originated as grapes and undergone many transformations. The coins represent wealth and hopes for prosperity. The germinated seeds represent the fertility of the land in Spring. The tablecloth used on the Haft Seen table is made of hand-woven cloth, known as Termeh. The Holy Book of the household is placed on this table. On the table are also placed a mirror for the reflection of life, candles representing the light of life, goldfish in a bowl as a sign of living form, a painted egg for each member of the family, traditional pastries and bread to symbolize a plentiful year. The family gathers around the table holding hands at the specific time of Equinox, which varies every year. As they wait, they place a sweet in their mouth and a coin in their hand. At the moment of transition into the new year or Sal Tahvil, family members embrace each other. A traditional meal is served made of steamed rice with chopped parsley, dill and chives served with fish, known as Sabzi Polo Mahi.

I particularly like the seven-things-beginning-with-S idea. What items with similarly-rich symbolic freight could we use in the English-speaking world, I wonder? snowdrops maybe, or sweet-peas, to represent the rebirth of nature; for colour (& as a token fruit) why not strawberries, albeit out-of-season? Saffron could stand for the spice-of-life and salt the safeguard against evil spirits. As a symbol of fermentation & transformation, I don’t know, cider, perhaps. For wealth & prosperity, silver would do, and, lastly, germinating sunflower seeds could represent the fertility of the land.

Perspectiva

The exhibition review which led me to the work of Giovanni Battista Bracelli (see below), also made intriguing mention of another work, a volume of designs by a German goldsmith called Christoph Jamnitzer. In the reviewer’s estimation, Bracelli’s designs were ‘timid’ in comparison with those in Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grottesken Buch.

I have been unable to find any on-line images from this work, but in so doing discovered that the Jamnitzer family had other illustrious sons, who, like Cristoph, worked as goldsmiths in 16th/17th Century Nuremburg. Perhaps the most famous of the clan was Cristoph’s grandfather Wentzel (or Wenzel) Jamnitzer, author of a visually fascinating work entitled Perspectiva Corporum Regularium.

George Hart, author of the Virtual Polyhedra web-site, rates Jamnitzer as ‘one of the most creative polyhedral artists of all time.’ Hart’s site also features pages on the contribtions to polyhedral art by Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, amongst others.

I lifted the present images from this site, which presents the work complete. At least one other site also plays host to a complete edition of the Perspectiva… Click on the images to see the etchings in a larger format.

To Laugh or to Cry?

On human life.

Weep for the troubles of human life now more than usual, Heraclitus: it overflows with many calamities. You, on the other hand, Democritus, laugh even more, if ever you laughed: life has become more ridiculous. Meanwhile, seeing these things, I wonder: how far in the end, Heraclitus, I may weep with you, or how, Democritus, I may joke merrily with you. Alciato - Emblem 152.

Democritus (ca. 460-370BC) was supposedly known as ‘the laughing philosopher’ because of his wry amusement at human foibles. He was a prolific author, but only fragments of his writings (on ethics) survive. Very little remains, likewise, of Heraclitus’ (fl. 500BC) treatise On Nature; its most famous doctrine being that everything exists in a state of flux, the apparent unity and stability in the world concealing a dynamic tension between opposites. I don’t know how Heraclitus became typecast as ‘the crying philosopher.’

Will it be farce, or tragedy, then, on which the curtain is about to rise? I am with Heraclitus, and say the latter - I find such comedy as there is too black to laugh at. On the other hand, Montaigne makes a strong case for the opposing view:

I am clearly for the first [Democritus’] humour: not because it is more pleasant to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised according to our full desert. Compassion and bewailing seem to imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment.

Here is a page featuring more depictions of the laughing and crying philosophers, which introduced me to Hendrick ter Brugghen’s paintings (1628) of the pair. Click on the thumbnails to see (much) larger versions of the same.

Bizzarie

Looking through the notes in my copy of the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta I found reference to a series of grotesque designs by one Cornelis Floris that had been engraved by his compatriot Frans Huys ca. 1555. There was only a minimum of information to be found about either man, but a review of a 1996 exhibition entitled The Grotesque: Ornamental Prints from the British Museum in which these artists’ collaboration was mentioned, led me on to other things.

My eye was drawn to a paragraph about an artist called Giovanni Battista Bracelli, who had apparently been active in Florence, Rome and Naples, between 1624 and 1649. In Florence in 1624 he had dedicated to the Medici thirty-two plates gathered under the title Bizzarie di varie figure. The title of this album was, the review said, most apt, as the figure studies therein were bizarre indeed, somewhat reminiscent, if anything, of the works of De Chirico, only three centuries before the fact.

Naturally I went looking for some examples of Bracelli’s work, finding a complete electronic edition of the Bizzarrie…, and also a more accessible selection of the figure-studies themselves, hidden somewhere at this site.

This vellum-bound curiosity is one of the rarest and most mysterious etching suites of the late Renaissance. The creation of an almost unknown Florentine painter and engraver, it languished in near-total obscurity until it was rediscovered in modern times. A remarkable precursor of the radical artistic movements of the twentieth century, this rare show of visual oddities is filled with fabulous and jocund variations on the human form, constructed from an hallucinatory variety of animate and inanimate components.

The Bizzarie can rightly lay claim to being a prime exemplar of the artistic enigma—a work truly without precedent or explanation beside itself. Its sensuous imagery, occupying a dreamlike space between thought and form, made it an underground sensation amongst twentieth-century artists and connoisseurs. The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-83) was instrumental in the rediscovery of Braccelli, and the poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) drew parallels between these etchings and the revolutionary artistic agendas of Dada and Surrealism. - Sue Welsh Reed.

Star-Charts

From Out of this world - the golden age of the celestial atlas, a marvellous exhibition formed from the collection of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, comes this selection of 16th, 17th and 18th century star-charts. Clicking on the images will open larger, pop-up versions of the same; the links in the title captions below each image go back to the relevant pages in the exhibition site.

Honter, Johannes. Imagines Constellationum Borealium [- Australium], in: Ptolemy, Claudius. Omnia quae extant opera. Basel, 1541.

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Bayer, Johann. Uranometria. Augsburg, 1603.

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Schiller, Julius. Coelum stellatum Christianum. Augsburg, 1627.

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Cellarius, Andreas. Harmonia macrocosmica. Amsterdam, 1661.

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Pardies, Ignace-Gaston. Globi coelestis. Paris, 1674.

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La Hire, Philippe. Planisphere celeste septentrional [-meridional]. Paris, 1705.

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Hevelius, Johannes. Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia. Gdansk, 1690.

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Flamsteed, John. Atlas celeste. Ed. J. Fortin. Paris, 1776.

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Calendar

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is one of the most sumptuous and beautiful of illuminated manuscripts, and is seen as the classic examplar of a mediaeval book of hours, a book, that is, modelled on a breviary, a standard compilation of liturgical texts. Other, supplementary material, such as calendars, additional prayers or psalms and masses were also often included in these volumes. The pictures below are the full-page miniatures that comprise the calendar section of the Très Riches Heures, which are considered to be a highlight of the manuscript, and a ‘pinnacle of the art of manuscript illumination’ in general.

It is thought that the miniatures were, with one exception, painted by Paul Limbourg, and his brothers Hermann and Jean. The three originated from the Flemish town of Nimwegen, and, by 1410, had entered into the sevice of Jean, Duc de Berry. They began work on the Très Riches Heures in 1413, but did not live to see its completion. It seems likely that, by 1416, they, like their patron, were all dead. The manuscript was not completed until the 1480s. Of the present images, only that for November belongs to this later period, and is thought to be largely the work of one Jean Colombe.

The Limbourgs used a wide variety of colours obtained from minerals, plants or chemicals and mixed with either arabic or tragacinth gum to provide a binder for the paint. Amongst the more unusual colours they used were vert de flambe, a green obtained from crushed flowers mixed with massicot, and azur d’outreme, an ultramarine made from crushed Middle Eastern lapis-lazuli, used to paint the brilliant blues.

It is this breathtaking ultramarine which initially catches ones eye, even in a reduced reproduction: how brightly these colours must shine from the original pages.

These images (and their captions) I lifted from this site. Clicking on the thumbnails will open full-sized pop-up images. The same pictures can also be found here. There is also a complete on-line version of the entire manuscript.

The Très Riches Heures is currently housed at the Musée Condé, in Chantilly.

Reader’s Block

For me there is such a thing as reader’s block, an awkward state-of-mind wherein none of the unread books to hand (and there may be many of them) seems satisfactorily attractive. At such times, I feel bad ordering yet more books, chiding myself that if I don’t eat the literary greens on my plate, then I surely can’t expect, and don’t deserve, the equivalent of dessert.

I have five unfinished books at my bedside, then, and can’t get into any of them: The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas has been there the longest - I ordered it last summer, and still haven’t advanced beyond page two. I read one other of Vesaas’ novels maybe eight years ago, a magnificent thing entitled The Ice-Palace, the glowing recollection of which, alas, has yet to draw me into the other book.

Then there is vol. 5 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I’ve made mention of before: I’m maybe sixty or seventy pages into it. Of the books I bought in Edinburgh last November, only one remains unread: Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a proto-surrealist work, apparently, and a book viewed as an anticipatory plagiarism by members of the OuLiPo. Its importance notwithstanding, the contents of pages one, two and three have yet to persuade me onward to page four.

I’ve made better progress (maybe eighty pages) into City by Alessandro Baricco. This book was a Christmas gift, and I’ve thus felt some obligation to persevere with it, even though I’ve not really enjoyed what I’ve read thus far. It strikes me that Baricco is trying to conjure up a comic-strip atmosphere, which he succeeds in doing, but, in the absence of pictures, it’s a contrivance that sticks flatly to the page.

Lastly, there is The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, which I have yet to attack with the momentum sufficient to clear the novel’s first sentence, one that, as the last but one link informs me, is a hundred and seventy-four words long.

By way of consolation, I now have a facsimile of the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta to dip into, which is ever a delight. Here is one more image from the book which I’ve found since my last mention of it.

Nazari

While on the subject of fascinating Renaissance woodcuts, here are a few more, from an alchemical treatise by one Giovanni Battista Nazari, initially entitled Il metamorfosi metallico et humano... first published in 1564.

I found them at Adam McLean's fabulous Alchemy web-site whilst looking for background info on the woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia.

At the same site there are extensive galleries of alchemical emblems that McLean has hand-tinted in watercolour, often with arrestingly beautiful results.

I had seen the fourth of these images once before, in an obscure, but rather interesting volume entitled Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, by Nuccio Ordine, one of a number of books by and about Bruno that I read during my second year in Rome.

The Strife of Love in a Dreame

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a fascinating book. It was first produced by renowned Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius (ca. 1450-1515) in 1499. A specialist in the publication of Greek and Latin texts, Aldus was also famous for developing new formats, such as the small, handheld book, and for typographical innovation: he intruduced, for example, the use of printed italics. The typeface used in the Hypnerotomachia was designed specifically for the book, and drew from classical manuscripts and inscriptions. Another novelty came with the book’s daring and singularly harmonious marriage of text and illustration. Mario Praz thought it the most beautiful of all Renaissance books.

Poliphilo entering, “with great feare, into a darke obscure and unfrequented wood.” He wears a round skull-cap upon his richly curled head, and has the lower part of his long gown tucked under his right arm.

The book was published anonymously, and the identity of its author has never been established with absolute certainty. There is a strong clue, however, in the decorated initials of each of the book’s thirty-eight chapters, which collectively spell out the phrase POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCUS COLONNA PERAMAVIT (Brother Francesco Colonna desperately loved Polia). The historical figure who seems most closely identifiable with this acrostic was an apparently wayward Dominican monk of that name (ca. 1433-1527), born in Venice, who was lector of rhetoric, grammar and foreign languages in Treviso before returning to his home city in 1472. His name otherwise touched the historical record in brief mentions of monastic insubordination and unsavoury allegations of sexual misconduct.

Poliphilo, who has emerged from the dark wood, is kneeling by the side of a rivulet, and upon the point of refreshing himself from its waters, when his attention is suddenly arrested by a wondrously sweet song.

Hypnerotomachia is a portmanteau word conjoining Greek terms for sleep, love and struggle, and was rendered in the title of the book’s first (partial) English translation as the strife of love in a dreame. Poliphili refers to the book’s protagonist Poliphilo, whose name could be translated as lover of many things, or, lover of Polia where Polia is indeed the the young woman whose love Poliphilo seeks. Wordplay like this extends throughout the text, written in an Italian teeming with unusual coinages derived from antique Greek and Latin.

Poliphilo sleeping under an oak-tree; in the background are wooded hills. “He thinks over all his wanderings, and in doing so, falls asleep under the tree.”

The body of the text relates Poliphilo’s progress through his dream-world, a kind of pagan paradise strewn with magnificent buildings and colossal ruins, whose architecture is described in loving, even fetishistic detail; and which is populated for the most part by comely nymphs clad in diaphanous gowns. On the simplest level, this is escapist fantasy, embodying the author’s sensual longings, and beyond that lie, one presumes, levels of allegorical meaning not obvious to the casual reader such as myself.

Poliphilo surrounded by remains of classical antiquity - a richly ornamented fragment of an architrave, a corslet, a Corinthian capital, and the base of a column. Behind Poliphilo, near a group of palm-trees, we see a ferocious wolf which, however, is flying before him. In the foreground, a lizard and some plants.

The MIT Press have compiled a complete, on-line version of the 1499 Hypnerotomachia in four hundred and sixty-seven JPEGs. Its chapter index is here. This was my source for these images, which show the first five of the ca. one hundred and seventy-two woodcuts which gracefully illustrate the text. The captions for the woodcuts I took from this page. Details of the 1999 English translation, without which I would have been able to read the book at all, can be found here.

A huge pyramidic temple, of white Parian marble, with 1410 steps, dedicated to the Sun; it is surmounted by a marvellous obelisk of Syenite marble, with a winged female figure at the top, holding a cornucopia in her right hand, and with her robes floating in the air.

And here is a sequence of a half-dozen pages, showing the first of the abovementioned images again, but this time in the context of the surrounding pages of text.

Four of the Books

I’ve read four of the books I bought in Cardiff eleven days ago. First was Mervyn Peake’s Letters from a Lost Uncle, a delightful tale of an errant uncle's Arctic quest for the elusive White Lion, related in a series of erratically typewritten epistles to the English nephew he has never met. The narrative overlays page after page of lushly imaginative pencil drawings. Some have gone so far as to describe this as Peake’s best work, and a forgotten masterpiece. While I wouldn’t go that far, it is an endearing and faintly haunting book.

In the course of my one-hour spree at Waterstone’s that Sunday, it occurred to me that I’d love to find some history or general reference work about emblem-books, whilst at the same time doubting they’d have such a thing in stock. Then, as luck would have it, I chanced upon a copy of The Emblem by John Manning. So, now I know a bit more about the content and historical development of Alciato’s Emblemata and its successors, about the rôles of the Horapollo and of the Hypnerotomachia as precursors to the emblem-book tradition, about imprese, about Ripa’s Iconologia and Picinelli’s Mundus Symbolicus, and more besides.

Third, I read Omon Ra, by Victor Pelevin, a very sharp satire about the Soviet space program, following the misfortunes of a young volunteer cosmonaut. The only other book of Pelevin’s I’d read was The Clay Machine-Gun (aka Buddha's Little Finger), a more ambitious but correspondingly less coherent novel. Both were the sort of books wherein one wishes the translator had supplied some explanatory footnotes, being suspicious that a fair proportion of the jokes, satirical points, puns on personal and place-names, and topical or historical allusions were just not getting across. Having said that, though, I suppose that a joke explained is, anyway, a joke lost. One that I did manage to get, albeit not straightaway, was the point of a discussion between two of the cosmonauts of the relative merits of various early Pink Floyd LPs — until it dawned on me: they were on their way to the Dark Side of the Moon...

And most recently, yet more Haruki Murakami, in the shape of The Elephant Vanishes.

Fat Tuesday Dream

I once had a memorably bizarre dream on a Mardi Gras theme, which went as follows:

I was sitting on a plush leather sofa with a couple of workmates, acquaintances. We were watching a movie on TV. The large, dimly-lit room was otherwise bare. It had the most beautiful parquet floor, and its windows were shuttered against the bright sunshine outside. The thing with the movie was that I had previously read all about it, and so pretty much knew at any given point what was going to happen next. A little bored, I got out of the sofa and crossed the room to a balcony door, which I opened. On the balcony, leaning against the rail, looking down and smoking a cigarette, stood another colleague, Signorina P________. I was disconcerted to see her there, but casually said hello, and joined her in observing a parade that passed along the street below. The parade was decidedly carnivalesque, but had the peculiar feature that all its participants were fat. There were fat people in shiny costumes, fat people outlandishly and clownishly made-up, fat drummers, fat kazooists, fat dancers and the like. At that point I knew I had to shout down and invite them up. I knew this because I had read all about the movie I had been watching, and knew that that was what happened next. Clearly, I was now in the movie, rather than merely watching it. I had to shout loudly several times to attract the paraders’ attention, but when I made myself heard, the revellers all trooped up to the large dark room and began to talk, to dance, to play music and make merry.

I lifted the Venetian carnival mask images from this site.