Zénith

I found the images below, of the balloon Zénith on its twenty-four hour flight from Paris to Arcachon (near Bordeaux) in March of 1875, amongst the many prints and photographs of the Tissandier collection, held at the Library of Congress. On doing a follow-up search about the Zénith, I learned that the balloon’s next flight, a high-altitude ascent attempted the following month, ended in tragedy…

It was now April the 15th, and the lofty flight was embarked upon by M. Gaston Tissandier, accompanied by MM. Croce-Spinelli and Sivel. Under competent advice, provision for respiration on emergency was provided in three small balloons, filled with a mixture of air and oxygen, and fitted with indiarubber hose pipes, which would allow the mixture, when inhaled, to pass first through a wash bottle containing aromatic fluid […]

Ascending at 11:30 under a warm sun, the balloon had by 13:00 reached an altitude of 16,000 feet, when the external air was at freezing point, the gas high in the balloon being 72 degrees, and at the centre 66 degrees. Ere this height had been fully reached, however, the voyagers had begun to breathe oxygen. At 11:57, an hour previously, Spinelli had written in his notebook, ‘Slight pain in the ears--somewhat oppressed--it is the gas.’ At 23,000 feet Sivel wrote in his notebook, ‘I am inhaling oxygen--the effect is excellent,’ after which he proceeded to urge the balloon higher by a discharge of ballast. The rest of the terrible narrative has now to be taken from the notes of M. Tissandier, […] one of the most thrilling narratives in aeronautical records…

At 23,000 feet we were standing up in the car. Sivel, who had given up for a moment, is re-invigorated. Croce-Spinelli is motionless in front of me…. I felt stupefied and frozen. I wished to put on my fur gloves, but, without being conscious of it, the action of taking them from my pocket necessitated an effort that I could no longer make…. I copy, verbatim, the following lines which were written by me, although I have no very distinct remembrance of doing so. They are traced in a hardly legible manner by a hand trembling with cold: ‘My hands are frozen. I am all right. We are all all right. Fog in the horizon, with little rounded cirrus. We are ascending. Croce pants; he inhales oxygen. Sivel closes his eyes. Croce also closes his eyes…. Sivel throws out ballast’--these last words are hardly readable. Sivel seized his knife and cut successively three cords, and the three bags emptied themselves and we ascended rapidly. The last remembrance of this ascent which remains clear to me relates to a moment earlier. Croce-Spinelli was seated, holding in one hand a wash bottle of oxygen gas. His head was slightly inclined and he seemed oppressed. I had still strength to tap the aneroid barometer to facilitate the movement of the needle. Sivel had just raised his hand towards the sky. As for myself, I remained perfectly still, without suspecting that I had, perhaps, already lost the power of moving. About the height of 25,000 feet the condition of stupefaction which ensues is extraordinary. The mind and body weaken by degrees, and imperceptibly, without consciousness of it. No suffering is then experienced; on the contrary, an inner joy is felt like an irradiation from the surrounding flood of light. One becomes indifferent. One thinks no more of the perilous position or of danger. One ascends, and is happy to ascend. The vertigo of the upper regions is not an idle word; but, so far as I can judge from my personal impression, vertigo appears at the last moment; it immediately precedes annihilation, sudden, unexpected, and irresistible.

When Sivel cut away the bags of ballast at the height of about 24,000 feet, I seemed to remember that he was sitting at the bottom of the car, and nearly in the same position as Croce-Spinelli. For my part, I was in the angle of the car, thanks to which support I was able to hold up; but I soon felt too weak even to turn my head to look at my companions. Soon I wished to take hold of the tube of oxygen, but it was impossible to raise my arm. My mind, nevertheless, was quite clear. I wished to explain, ‘We are 8,000 metres high’; but my tongue was, as it were, paralysed. All at once I closed my eyes, and, sinking down inert, became insensible. This was about 13:30. At 14.08, I awoke for a moment, and found the balloon rapidly descending. I was able to cut away a bag of ballast to check the speed and write in my notebook the following lines, which I copy:

We are descending. Temperature, 3 degrees. I throw out ballast. Barometer, 12.4 inches. We are descending. Sivel and Croce still in a fainting state at the bottom of the car. Descending very rapidly.

Hardly had I written these lines when a kind of trembling seized me, and I fell back weakened again. There was a violent wind from below, upwards, denoting a very rapid descent. After some minutes I felt myself shaken by the arm, and I recognised Croce, who had revived. ‘Throw out ballast,’ he said to me, ‘we are descending’; but I could hardly open my eyes, and did not see whether Sivel was awake. I called to mind that Croce unfastened the aspirator, which he then threw overboard, and then he threw out ballast, rugs, etc.

All this is an extremely confused remembrance, quickly extinguished, for again I fell back inert more completely than before, and it seemed to me that I was dying. What happened? It is certain that the balloon, relieved of a great weight of ballast, at once ascended to the higher regions.

At 15:30 I opened my eyes again. I felt dreadfully giddy and oppressed, but gradually came to myself. The balloon was descending with frightful speed and making great oscillations. I crept along on my knees, and I pulled Sivel and Croce by the arm. ‘Sivel! Croce!’ I exclaimed, ‘Wake up!’ My two companions were huddled up motionless in the car, covered by their cloaks. I collected all my strength, and endeavoured to raise them up. Sivel’s face was black, his eyes dull, and his mouth was open and full of blood. Croce’s eyes were half closed and his mouth was bloody.

To relate what happened afterwards is quite impossible. I felt a frightful wind; we were still 9,700 feet high. There remained in the car two bags of ballast, which I threw out. I was drawing near the earth. I looked for my knife to cut the small rope which held the anchor, but could not find it. I was like a madman, and continued to call ‘Sivel! Sivel!’ By good fortune I was able to put my hand upon my knife and detach the anchor at the right moment. The shock on coming to the ground was dreadful. The balloon seemed as if it were being flattened. I thought it was going to remain where it had fallen, but the wind was high, and it was dragged across fields, the anchor not catching. The bodies of my unfortunate friends were shaken about in the car, and I thought every moment they would be jerked out. At length, however, I seized the valve line, and the gas soon escaped from the balloon, which lodged against a tree. It was then four o’clock. On stepping out, I was seized with a feverish attack, and sank down and thought for a moment that I was going to join my friends in the next world; but I came to. I found the bodies of my friends cold and stiff. I had them put under shelter in an adjacent barn. The descent of the ‘Zénith’ took place in the plains 155 miles from Paris as the crow flies. The greatest height attained in this ascent is estimated at 28,000 feet.

The above account is taken from Chapter XIX of The Dominion of the Air: The Story of Aerial Navigation by Rev. J. M. Bacon (1902), as reproduced here.

Aldrovandi’s Herbal

The treasures presented by the University of Bologna’s library at their ‘Librit’ site include selections from nine volumes (six printed works, two manuscripts, and an album of woodcuts), by one of the University’s most famous alumni, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605).

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Aldrovandi was a polymath who ‘wrote many works on natural studies, hydrology, various diseases, ornithology, botany, entomology, pharmacology, medicine, cosmology and legendary animals, such as dragons and unicorns.’ The present images are taken from a manuscript in which Aldrovandi painted representations of dozens of ‘alchemical plants.’

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This little herbal, continuing from volume XI of Aldrovandi's ‘Tavole di piante’ presents us with a proper thematic consistency, containing representations of fifty-six ‘alchemical plants.’ The images therein differ from those contained in the rest of Aldrovandi’s painted herbals, being less true-to-life, more stylised. They are embellished here and there with fantastic details, which often make reference to the supposed properties of the various herbs.

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For more about Aldrovandi, and about the museum at the University of Bologna which preserves much of his collection of naturalia see Il Teatro della Natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi (in Italian only, alas).

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Signor Montanelli’s Giornale, etc.

I am certain that the great majority of the referrers who arrive at this page having searched for Il Giornale or Il Giornale Nuovo are looking for information from or about the newspaper of that name, founded in Milan in 1974 by journalist and editor Indro Montanelli (1909-2001, left), and not some Welsh bloke’s weblog. I’m not sure that Il Giornale even has an on-line presence - at least I haven’t found it included in any listings of Italian news(paper) sites - but, if I could find one, I’d put a link to it on the left of this page, along with a blurb in my best pidgin Italian, in the hope of helping these visitors on their way to their desired destination.

Signor Montanelli must have been quite a guy: this is a man who, as a freelancer covering the Spanish Civil War, was expelled from the Italian journalists’ union and forced into temporary exile because of the objective tenor of his reports. In previous years, he had supported the Fascists, and had served in Mussolini’s Abyssinian campaign. In 1939 he returned to Italy, securing a job at Il Corriere della Sera. In 1943 he was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to death for an article he wrote about Mussolini, but managed to escape after 10 months in prison. He was one of the first journalists to report back from the 1956 uprising in Budapest. In 1974, he quit Il Corriere, dismayed by an editorial lurch to the political left, and went on to found the centre-right-aligned Il Giornale Nuovo. Among those who visited him in hospital after he was shot four times in the legs by Red Brigade terrorists in Milan in 1977, was his good friend, Silvio Berlusconi.

The following year, Berlusconi became a minority shareholder in Il Giornale. When, however, in 1994, Berlusconi decided to enter politics, Montanelli (by then aged 86) saw a conflict of interests, and quit, setting up yet another newspaper, La Voce, which he used to oppose and criticise his former friend’s political progress. ‘I was forced to found a new newspaper when I became aware of the incompatibility between my independence and the will of the proprietor,’ he said, ‘who, until he entered politics, had been an exemplary proprietor.’ In another show of straight-backed stubbornness, in 1991 he refused an appointment as senator-for-life from the then-president Francesco Cossiga, stating ‘Unfortunately, the model of an absolutely independent journalist prevents me from accepting this flattering offer.’

Montanelli’s new journal was far from being the first thus named. A Google image-search turned up this ’30s-vintage Il Nuovo Giornale front page with alarming news of a ‘proclamation to the German Armed Forces: answer violence with violence’…

…and, going much further back still, this eighteenth-century Venetian almanac’s title-page:

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Anima Animus Animation

Having recently discovered a liking for the art of Jan Švankmajer (as mentioned in a previous entry), I ordered a DVD compilation of some of his short films, which is still, I think, on its way, and a book: Anima Animus Animation which was published in Prague in 1998 to catalogue an exhibition of his and of his wife Eva’s art, whilst also serving as general survey of the couple’s lives and works. A few images scanned from this book follow below…

The book emphasizes the central importance of the Švankmajers#8217; forty-and-more year union (they were married in 1960), and, on its title page, their names are conjoined as EVAŠVANKMAJERJAN. Even so, one can easily see two distinct artistic personæ at play, between which I must admit a definite preference for the husband’s work over the wife’s.

I was intrigued to read more about the ‘natural history’ images featured in my previous entry:

At the beginning of the 1970s, I started a wild project - I wanted to create an encyclopædia of a kind of alternative world, Švank-meyer’s Bilderlexicon. I started mapping its fictitious fauna and flora, I thought up an equivalent technology and architecture, history and cartography […] After two years of work the project was left as a torso, because I came to realise it would take me all my life. It also occurred to me that if a mystificatory encyclopædia is to be realised, it needs to be published, something which in the 1970s seemed utterly impossible…—JŠ.

I wonder if the abortive Bilderlexicon was any influence on Luigi Serafini?

Not only was publication problematic for Švankmajer in the 1970s, but, for much of the same decade he was prevented from making films, too, after editing some unauthorised documentary footage into his 1972 short Leonardo’s Diary.

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Whilst surrealism has been the most pervasive influence on Švankmajer’s work (he joined the Czech Surrealist group in 1970, and has been a member ever since), the mannerist art of Rudolfine Prague, and in particular the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, has also left its mark, never more obviously than in the following piece:

Clicking on any of the images above will open a larger version of the same.

‘Let our life be like this music!’

For a while it was my habit to comb through the several junkshops in the town where I live in search of LPs. I looked out for classical music in particular, as I found that a pittance spent on a couple of records was a good, low-risk way of finding out whether or not I liked this or that piece by such and such a composer. Mostly, there was a fairly uniform distribution of unadventurous selections by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mozart - but there were also a few surprises to be had. One such was a concentration of music with a Romanian theme in one of the junkshops, perhaps the town’s smallest, which was, and still is, shoehorned into a couple of street-level rooms in an apartment-complex on Amiralitetsgatan (Admiralty Street). Their shelves carried several discs of Romanian folk music, a generous selection of the works of Georghe Zamfir (pan-flautist extraordinaire), and a couple of LPs with miscellaneous works by the Romanian-born composer George Enescu.

One of the LPs I bought there was a 1971 10-inch 33 on the Electrecord label featuring what are, apparently, Enescu’s most popular works: his two Romanian Rhapsodies. It wasn’t until I’d taken this record home that I noticed the inscription on the back of the sleeve: ‘Let our life be like this music! / 13 Oct. 1972 / Ariana.’

I was touched by this sentiment, and couldn’t help but wonder what the record’s history may have been: imagining, for instance, that it could have been a gift between young lovers fleeing from Ceaucescu’s regime and beginning a new life in Sweden… (although in that case, why would the inscription be in English?) Whatever the truth of the tale, I hope things went well for Ariana, that her life, and that of the record’s recipient, were as rhapsodic as she had wished them, and that the fact of the record’s languishing unwanted in a junkshop in an out-of-the-way Swedish town, thirty years after its purchase, is no indication of a thwarted dream.

Another of the records I bought from that same store featured some performances by the renowned violist Yuri Bashmet, including just one short composition of Enescu’s, a Konzertstück for viola & piano, which had been, if the scratching on the disc was anything to go by, the only track on it that its original owner had ever played.

For me, though, the main attraction on this record was the fabulous rendition of German-born composer Paul Hindemith’s 1919 Sonata op. 11/4 for viola and piano. This is a plaintive piece, in which a large measure of emotive late-romanticism is tempered with just a dash of astringent modernism: it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since. To listen to a sample of another fine performance of this sonata, click here.

In my subsequent, rather haphazard exploration of Hindemith’s oeuvre, there have been more misses, alas, than hits, as much of his later work has what strikes me as a rather hard-edged & angular feel about it that can be hard to like. Having said that, if the sample above is to your taste, you may also enjoy his 2nd piano sonata, and, perhaps, his 3rd string quartet.

Title-Pages

The University of Sydney library’s rare books department is running an on-line exhibition entitled Origins of Modernity which displays example pages, with commentary, from ‘over 140 original volumes of the most important works in the emergence of modern thought and culture.’ In many cases, it is the books’ title-pages that are on show, many of them very fine examples of the splendidly verbose typographical façades one associates with 17th and 18th Century publications. I’ve snipped some details, below, from a few of these pages: click on the images to see them in full, in situ, on the relevant exhibition page.

Hales, Stephen (1677-1761); Vegetable staticks, or, An account of some statical experiments on the sap in vegetables : being an essay towards a natural history of vegetation. Also a specimen of an attempt to analyse the air, by a great variety of chymio-statical experiments; which were read at several meetings before the Royal Society… London: Printed for W. and J. Innys; and T. Woodward, 1727.

Power, Henry (1623-1668); Experimental philosophy, in three books: containing new experiments microscopical, mercurial, magnetical: with some deductions, and probable hypotheses, raised from them, in avouchment and illustration of the now famous atomical hypothesis. London: Printed by T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry…, 1664.

’s Gravesande, Willem Jacob (1688-1742); Mathematical elements of natural philosophy, confirm’d by experiments, or, An introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s philosophy written in Latin by William-James s’Gravesande…; translated into English by J.T. Desaguliers; London: Printed for J. Senex…, W. Innys and R. Maney…, and T. Longman, 1737; Fifth edition.

Aubrey, John (1626-1697); Miscellanies upon the following subjects : I. Day-fatality; II. Local-fatality; III. Ostenta; IV. Omens; V. Dreams… XXI. Second-sighted persons; XXII. The discovery of two murders by an apparition; Collected by John Aubrey. The second edition, with large additions. To which is prefixed some account of his life; London: Printed for A. Bettesworth etc., 1721.

Helmont, Jean Baptiste van (1577-1644); A ternary of paradoxes: the magnetick cure of wounds, nativity of tartar in wine, image of God in man; London : Printed by James Flesher for William Lee, 1650.

Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688); The true intellectual system of the universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated; London: Printed for R. Royston, 1678.

Pomet, Pierre (1658-1699) & Lémery, Nicolas (1645-1715); A compleat history of drugs written in French by Monsieur Pomet… to which is added what is observable on the same subject, from Messrs. Lemery, and Tournefort, divided into three classes, vegetable, animal and mineral. London: Printed for R. Bonwicke, William Freeman… and Ralph Smith, 1712.

James Henry Pullen

Yesterday’s post at the reliably excellent things magazine weblog discussed an on-line project about the Cane Hill Asylum in Surrey. This prompted me to remember that there had been an asylum not far from Redhill, the Surrey town where I lived for most of ’99 and ’00, and I wondered, momentarily, if this were the same asylum. After a few minutes’ rifling through some dusty boxes in my memory I concluded that it was not, when I recalled the name of the place, Royal Earlswood: originally an ‘Idiot Asylum’, it is now a luxury apartment complex.

I had heard it said that Earlswood Asylum had become ‘Royal’ because one of Queen Victoria’s feeble-minded relatives had been confined there. I could find no confirmation of that claim, but did discover that there was one inmate of the asylum who attained a certain celebrity. His name was James Henry Pullen, who earned a reputation as an idiot-savant thanks to his fantastically elaborate carvings and meticulously-built models.

This amazing model has been described as the Mystic Representation of the World as a Ship, and was built by Pullen in 1866. He created a half-hemisphere globe, with a central sun through which could be seen the Queen’s cabin with table, writing materials, despatch boxes and ‘other requisites for use and ornamentation’. It is decorated outside by the moon, stars, a rainbow, clouds and flashes of lightning and a comet for a rudder - Freda Knight.

Pullen made highly-detailed models of real ships, too, including his masterpiece, a model of Brunel’s The Great Eastern that took him three years to construct. Pullen also made some striking works in other media, including a pictorial record of what he considered the major events of his life…

…and a collage made from hundreds of cigar bands, many of which were likely given to him by Edward, Prince of Wales, whom Pullen apparently referred to as‘friend Wales.’

I was dismayed to learn that I must have passed right by some of these objects many times without ever sparing them a glance, as part of the collection of the Royal Earlswood Museum has, since the hospital’s closure, been on display in ‘The Belfry’ shopping centre in Redhill, a characterless place that I walked through hundreds of times, never once suspecting that there were fascinating treasures close at hand.

Some Old Pictures of Fish, etc.

Here are some old woodcuts of fish and other marine fauna that caught my eye when I happened upon this page. They are taken from Guillaume Rondelet.s Libri de Piscibus Marinis…, which dates from 1554-55.

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Clicking on all but the first of the images above will open a larger version of the same.

Della Porta

Some months ago I wrote an entry here around some striking physiognomical images by the 17th-century artist Charles Le Brun. I find this kind of imagery fascinating, and so was pleased to discover some very similar, albeit cruder, images from a considerably earlier source, the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta’s 1586 treatise De Humana Physiognomia.

Della Porta was a polymath who also wrote and published on such subjects as natural magic, cryptography, horticulture, optics, mnemonics, meteorology, physics, astrology, mathematics, and fortification. He theorised that ‘physical traits shared by animals and men are indices to their characters.’

Comparing the faces of a sheep and a sheeplike man, della Porta observes that the wide strongly defined mouth common to both indicates stupidity and impiety […] He agrees with Aristotle that fleshy faces denote laziness, and illustrates the point with parallel figures of a man and a cow who look like brother and sister - Louise George Clubb.

Apparently, della Porta’s treatise languished for some years in the offices of the Papal censor before its publication was approved. Physiognomy was viewed by the ecclesiastical authorities as tantamount to divination, and the supposition that internal qualities depended on external features seemed to them suspiciously close to a denial of free will. Bulls issued by Pope Sixtus V in 1585/6 outlawed fortune-telling by means of chiromancy, physiognomy, or other arts. Della Porta sidestepped this prohibition and avoided a listing on the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum by prefixing his work with a declaration that human features indicate only predispositions, and that it was up to ones individual conscience whether or not to follow ones nose, as it were.

I had forgotten, or perhaps had barely even noticed in the first place, that Sir Thomas Browne wrote on the subject of physiognomy in his Religio Medici and Christian Morals.

…there is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a mercifull aspect, and will single out a face, wherein they spy the signatures and markes of mercy: for there are mystically in our faces certaine characters which carry in them the motto of our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures - Sir Thos. Browne.

It is plausible that della Porta’s works could have influenced Browne, granted that the latter’s library contained several volumes of the former’s works. Both della Porta’s and Browne’s writings on the subject were later cited by Johan Caspar Lavater in his physiognomical works. It is a mark of the sea-change that had taken place in the meantime that, whereas della Porta’s physiognomy was seen as pseudo-divination, Lavater’s had become pseudo-science.

What I Haven’t Been Reading Lately

Mostly, I haven’t been reading Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver. I haven’t been altogether consistent in not reading it, however, and have managed about a hundred and twenty pages in the course of the past month: at which rate I should have the whole thing read by the end of next May. This is a book whose setting (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) and whose subject (the emergence of the new natural philosophy and with it the modern scientific worldview) ought to be of great and immediate interest to me. And so they are, but this has done nothing to hasten my progress. In mitigation, it is a dauntingly long book, or rather the first of a series of three dauntingly long books. In further mitigation, the UK edition is so cheaply and nastily made, and printed on such poor-quality paper, that it is almost a displeasure to hold the thing.

There have, meanwhile, been times when, tired of not reading Quicksilver, I have instead turned to not reading the copy of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Nautical Chart that my colleague Mr N________ gave me in return for one of the items in my latest book giveaway. More seldom still, I haven’t been reading Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence. Behind all these inactions lies another, fainter but more persistent one: I haven’t been reading Proust, either.