The Birth and Education of Dionysus

Some scenes from the birth and education of Dionysus:

The birth of Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele. The young mother, wearing a diadem, rests on a royal bed, with draperies at her back. The basin will be used for bathing the new-born infant. The chiaroscuro effect gives the scene the appearence of a high relief. The figures have a very sculptural quality.

Hermes is depicted entrusting the new-born Dionysus to the nymphs of Mount Nysa; Silenus was later to be responsible for his education. The temple column, on the left, aludes to the divine character of the child, while the bare tree on the right represents the wild nature of the myth of the god of wine. The nymphs who brought Dionysus up were subsequently transformed into stars: the Hyades.

Scene representing the childhood of Dionysus. The young god is depicted riding a goat, together with another child, framed by a woman playing a drum and a shepherd.

Dionysus is seated between two dancing Bacchantes. The border is composed of bucrania surrounded by racemes on a pale yellow ground. The series is interrupted, in the centre of each side, by medallions featuring swans and, at the corners, by four different theatrical masks.

The scene represents the Triumph of Dionysus, with the god seated on a throne under a tholos. He is surrounded by the four Seasons, more or less easily identifiable, while a serving boy offers him wine. The border is composed of vine tendrils peopled by winged figures alternating with masks. In the corners are pairs of putti holding helmets against a black background. In the centre of each side are pairs of Bacchantes.

I lifted the present images out of a larger selection of etchings from a 1776 folio by one Marco Carloni entitled Le Terme di Tito e loro Interne Pitture, that is, roughly, ‘The Baths of Titus and their Interior Decoration,’ The Baths of Titus ‘occupied the area just northeast of the Colosseum […] to the side of the Domus Aurea,’ and it is specifically the excavated interior of the Domus, the Emperor Nero’s grandiloquent palace, that is depicted in these etchings, which are close copies of the original paintings and decorations.

The Domus Aurea (Golden House), Rome (A.D. 64-68 and possibly later), was built or begun by Nero after the great fire in A.D. 64. It was less a palace than a series of pavilions and a long wing comprising living and reception rooms, all set in a vast landscaped park with an artificial lake in its centre where the Colosseum now stands. Most of it has largely disappeared - Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture.

The captions for each of the above pictures is taken, by way of the Galleria Trincia website, from the Franco Maria Ricci volume Roma Domus Aurea. Some other of Marco Carloni’s etchings are available to buy in poster form. For my own future reference, there is more about Dionysus here and here.

The Inner Organs of Beasts and Fowls

The one part of James Joyce’s Ulysses that has stuck most persistently in my mind since I first read it about fourteen years ago is not its famous ending, but rather the opening pages of chapter four, in which we are first introduced to the book’s principal character…

I couldn’t explain how it came about, but, any mention of Ulysses will evoke, for me, the phrase ‘made him feel a bit peckish’ before anything else.

Unlike Mr Bloom, I seldom partake of offal, although I like the flavour of some of it well enough. I suppose I share in the latterday squeamishness that, I would hazard, makes ‘variety meats’ a considerably lesser part of my generation’s diet than that of Joyce’s. On Sunday morning then, confronted with the piece of calf’s liver we’d picked up the day before, I wasn’t at all sure what to do with it, having never once before tried cooking the stuff myself.

The Conran Cookbook came to my aid with a recipe for Foie de Veau à la Lyonnaise. This required I sautée some sliced onions in butter admixed with a little lard until they were very soft, and then, pushing the onions to one side, fry slices of the liver, pre-seasoned with salt and pepper, alongside them. As a final step, a couple of tablespoonfuls of red wine vinegar were to be sizzled in the pan for a few seconds - having none, I used balsamic vinegar instead, which turned out just fine. The liver, served with the onions on top, was very tasty. To add insult to artery-clogging injury, I’d fried up some bacon and sausages too, and some hash browns… it made for quite the breakfast.

Redon’s Noirs

There follow images of some of the works in charcoal and chalk by French painter and graphic artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916). These, together with some of his darkly monochrome lithographs, have been collectively dubbed noirs.

Redon was a late starter who, after numerous setbacks and false starts, gradually began to find a style of his own from the mid 1870s. It wasn’t until 1879, and the publication of his first album of lithographs Dans le Rêve that Redon’s work began to attract wider attention.

Many of his most fervent admirers were writers, and a good deal of his inspiration was, reciprocally, literary: he published lithographs inspired by Poe, and, later by Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine. He was lauded by Huysmans, and was a close friend of Mallarmé’s.

Only in the 1890s did Redon’s pallette admit the full spectrum of colour, supplanting the sombre melancholy of his earlier work with a vibrant mysticism. As though making up for those black-and-white years, many of these later pieces, those in pastel especially, positively glow with colour - as I can personally attest, having been lucky enough to catch the 1995 Redon exhibition during its stop at the Royal Academy in London.

The images here were snipped from the Artchive, the Webmuseum and Artmagick. Clicking on them will open larger versions of the same.

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Arrivederci, Malmö

In Malmö over the weekend we enjoyed the spiciest meal we’d eaten for many months, courtesy of the Restaurang India on Amiralsgatan. It’s generally true that the Swedes are wary of piquant food - stuffs labelled here as stark (in this context, hot), often seem medium-spicy, or merely mild, to our palates.

We dined at Pizza Hut too. In other countries, the Hut’s station in the pizza hierarchy would be a humble one. Not so in Sweden, where the horror of what passes for everyday takeaway pizza is such that a stuffed-crust Super Supreme is a true gourmet experience by comparison.

We’d only ever passed through Malmö before, on our way to or from Copenhagen, but were glad we took the time to visit it this time around. It’s a not-too-big, not-too-small kind of a place. Seeing as how we’ve become so accustomed to small-town life, it struck us as just cosmopolitan enough. The red-brick buildings and the canals made it vaguely reminiscent, to me, of a Northern English city.

And, besides all the eating, and the shopping, we got to savour the slight but definite thrill of our first ever Wi-Fi experience, attained whilst sitting in the lobby of the Radisson on Östergatan.

Buckling Springs

In pursuit of simultaneous his’n’hers internet access, my wife and I bought a second desktop machine at El Giganten a couple of months back. It’s an ugly-looking but relatively inexpensive (and adequately well-specified) Packard Bell ‘ixtreme’ model.

One part of it that wasn’t adequate, however, was the keyboard, which must be one of the flimsiest and nastiest I’ve ever laid my hands on. We returned to the same store and perused their stock, which afforded a fairly limited choice of Logitech and Microsoft models. My wife asked which of them I liked best at which I prodded glumly at a few keys on each of the displays and complained that I didn’t really like any of them very much, and that ‘they don’t make keyboards like they used to.’ We left with a Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro set, which, to be fair, was at least a good deal better than the keyboard it was meant to replace.

My curmudgeonly outlook on the subject stems from the fact that I’ve been using computers just long enough to recall with fond nostalgia the metallic click-&-clack of those beige keyboards that often accompanied beige ’80s PCs. And whilst PCs have been improved since then in almost every other respect, it seems to me that the quality of keyboards has, conversely, deteriorated.

Seeking to recapture some of that retro keyclick feel, I discovered that a company called Unicomp in fact do make keyboards like they (specifically IBM), used to. I ordered one of their ‘customiser’ models, with a British layout, refreshingly free of all those extra keys you never needed in the first place, and, most importantly, with what I now know is termed a buckling spring key action, the source of those telltale clicks and clacks.

Ruysch

Albertus Seba’s collection was not the only one that Peter the Great acquired in his 1717-18 visit to Amsterdam (see my previous entry). He also purchased Frederik Ruysch’s cabinet of anatomical curios. Between them, these collections formed the basis of the Russian Academy of Science’s cabinet - indeed Ruysch’s collection is still held complete by the Academy, in St Petersburg.

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a Dutch anatomist and a pioneer in techniques of preserving organs and tissue. In addition to his scientific contributions, he made artistic arrangements of his material. He had his own museum of curiosities, and among the displays were a number of dioramas assembled from body parts and starring melodramatic fetal skeletons. A few of these were captured in meticulous detail ‘drawn from life’ by the engraver Cornelius Huyberts. These engravings were inserted as foldouts in various early 18th century editions of Ruysch’s works - from a Zymoglyphic Museum page about Ruysch.

Ruysch […] was the first great exponent of the anatomical specimen. Visitors from all over Europe came to marvel at his ‘repository of curiosities.’ As Amsterdam’s chief instructor of midwives and ‘legal doctor’ to the court, Ruysch had ample access to the bodies of stillborns and dead infants and used them to create extraordinary multi-specimen scenes. In making such displays, he claimed an extraordinary privilege: the right to collect and exhibit human material without the consent of the anatomized - from the Dream Anatomy exhibit pages at the National Library of Medicine.

Some time before I learned of Ruysch’s morbid dioramas, I was acquainted with his name from its appearance in the title of Giacomo Leopardi’s haunting Dialogue Between Frederik Ruysch and his Mummies, written in 1824. Its scenario has Ruysch awakened one night by a group of his dead specimens singing a lugubrious chorus, after which he learns that some freakish conjunction of the stars has, albeit for the briefest of interludes, granted the dead the power of speech…

RUYSCH. …but since time is short and leaves no choice, let me know in brief what kind of sensations of body and mind you experienced at the point of death.
MUMMY. I didn’t notice the actual point of death.
THE OTHER MUMMIES. We didn’t either.
RUYSCH. How come you didn’t notice it?
MUMMY. Just as you never notice the moment you begin to sleep, no matter how much attention you pay.
RUYSCH. But to fall asleep is natural.
MUMMY. And you don’t think dying is natural? Show me a man, or an animal, or a plant that doesn’t die.
RUYSCH. I’m no longer surprised that you go on singing and talking if you didn’t notice when you died. ‘Unwitting of the blow, he went ahead/Combatting still, and yet already dead,’ writes an Italian poet. I thought that on this question of death, those like you would know something more than the living. But going back to our subject, at the point of death didn’t you feel any pain?
MUMMY. What kind of pain can it be if one who feels it doesn’t notice it?
RUYSCH. At any rate, all are convinced that the sensation of death is extremely painful.
MUMMY. As if death were a sensation, and not the opposite…

RUYSCH. Then what is death if it’s not pain?
MUMMY. Pleasure rather than anything else. You should know that dying, like falling asleep, does not take place in an instant, but by degrees. True, these degrees are more or less greater or smaller according to the variety of the causes and to the kinds of death. In the last moment, death brings neither pain nor pleasure, no more than does sleep. In the preceding moments it cannot produce pain becaise pain is something alive, and, at that time, that is, after the beginning of death, man’s senses are moribund, which is like saying weakened in the extreme. It may well be a cause of pleasure, for pleasure is not always something alive; in fact, most human pleasures consist in some sort of langour, so that man’s senses are capable of pleasure even when they are near extinction since very often langour itself is pleasure, especially when it frees you from suffering; for, as you well know, the cessation of pain or discomfort is in itself pleasure. So, the langour of death ought to be the more welcome as it frees man from greater suffering…

The images above are details excerpted from two of the engravings of Ruysch’s handiwork presented at the Dream Anatomy exhibit (see above for a link). The Leopardi I took from the 1982 edition of his Operette Morali - Essays and Dialogues as translated by Giovanni Cecchetti.

Some Serpentine Specimens

Albertus Seba (1665-1736) was a Dutch apothecary and collector, who, in the 1730s began a project to publish a fully-illustrated catalogue of his renowned collection of naturalia. Seba oversaw the production of the first two volumes of this opus, Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio…, issued in 1734 and 1735. Two further volumes were issued posthumously, in 1758 and 1765.

In 2001, Taschen books published a splendid volume, entitled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, reproducing all of the 446 copperplates from a hand-coloured copy of Seba’s Thesaurus belonging to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (the Dutch national library), in the Hague. I obtained a copy of it earlier this year.

Seba was an avid collector who cultivated contacts in such far-flung locales as Sri Lanka, Greenland, Virginia and Batavia, the better to obtain information about specimens that might be added to his ‘cabinet,’ moreover:

…he supplied departing ships with cases of medicines and treated their crews. It is related how, whenever a ship arrived in port, Seba would hasten down to the harbour without delay and administer medicines to the exhausted sailors. Any natural specimens that they had brought with them he would then be able to purchase for a good price, or accept in exchange for his medications.

In 1717 Seba scored a spectacular success when he negotiated the sale of his entire collection as it then stood to the visiting Tsar, Peter the Great. It comprised ‘72 drawers full of shells, 32 drawers displaying 1,000 European insects, and 400 jars of animal specimens preserved in alcohol.’ The proceeds of this sale were invested in a second collection, even more extensive than the first.

Seba’s collection, and by extension his Thesurus reflected his particular fascinations: Vol. 2 is dominated by images of reptiles, and of snakes in particular (as exemplified here), whilst Vol. 3 is given over, for the most part, to specimens of marine creatures.

Due to the great size of the book, I was unable to make any satisfactory scans of its illustrations, and resorted instead to photographing some of them, with results that are not, alas, that much better. Click on the images to view much larger versions of the same.

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Švankmajer

I had no idea that Czech animator Jan Švankmajer works in other media too: notably sculpture and graphic art.

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All but the last of the present images apparently belong to the ‘Natural History’ section of a series of works collectively entitled Švankmajer’s Encyclopædia, or Švank-Meyer’s Bilderlexicon.

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Švankmajer’s art brings together so many of my fascinations that I could kick myself for not having found out about it sooner. I’m grateful to Michael Brooke, for his excellent Švankmajer website, Alchemist of the Surreal, and, once again, to Sig. Mori for posting a link to it at cipango.

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Hall of Frame

Having worn spectacles for maybe twenty years, I am somewhat interested in the aesthetics of facewear (my myopic eyeballs are presently peering through lenses held in place by a pair of tortoiseshell-effect Calvin Klein frames). Even so, I would struggle to summon the enthusiasm to pay a visit to the Museum of Vision Science and Optometry when (if ever) I happen to pass through Waterloo, Ontario.

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Having said that, I am grateful for the museum’s curators having posted some sample exhibits from their collection on-line, some of which I’ve reproduced here. Alas, their website provides no further details about most of the glasses pictured therein.

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Our Collection in the Museum includes many optometry devices and glasses. One of the main attractions in the museum is the ‘Hall of Frame’. The Hall of Frame is a unique collection in its kind and contains glasses from many famous people such as prime minister of Canada Mr Brian Mulroney, former president of the United States Mr Jimmy Carter and many famous Hollywood stars such as Sir Anthony Hopkins, Isabelle Adjani and many other people…

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Also at the Museum’s site, they have some cool optical illusions.

Star Dust

Not far from the apartment where I first lived in Rome, there was a street-sign that read, simply, ‘Star Dust.’ It intrigued me enough to take a photo of it…

…but, then again, not quite so much that I ever followed that side-road in search of the Dust itself. When I turned up this picture in a trawl through some old photographs a little while ago, I took time to see whether Star Dust Italia SpA had any kind of web presence, and, as it turns out, they do. It further turns out that they offer a range of skincare and haircare product-lines to the discerning connoisseur, as well as cosmetics and perfumes, notably ‘Trendy (pour famme)’ and ‘Bushy (pour homme.)’

I can consider the Star Dust case closed, then: yet another long-standing minor mystery solved for me by the web.

Iconologia

The Biblioteca Virtuale On-Line, BIVIO, for short, collects and presents to us a number of Renaissance texts including no fewer than three editions of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia: the first, unillustrated edition of 1593 being supplemented by the second and third (expanded and illustrated) Italian editions of 1603 and 1611 respectively. Below are a few of the images from the 1611 edition, beginning with, firstly and secondly, the personifications of Europe and America:

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Next up: thirdly, the representation of knowledge (sapienza), and fourthly, that of vanity:

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Followed by, fifthly and sixthly - lechery, (libidine), and virginity:

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And, penultimately and lastly - constancy and caprice:

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Besides the editions mentioned above, there are at least another two complete on-line Iconologies: the first English edition of 1709, and a later Italian edition, dating from 1764-7. The illustrations in these later editions became ever more elaborate and refined, as, meanwhile, the text and its range of examples was expanded and revised: a tendency culminating in the lovely Hertel edition of 1758-60, readily available, fortunately, as a Dover paperback.