Perspectiva Literaria

In 1567, Nuremburg goldsmith Hans Lencker published his illustrated treatise Perspectiva Literaria, one of three remarkable studies in perspective published in Bavaria at around the same time (I have already made mention here of Stoer’s Geometria et Perspectiva (Augsburg, 1567) and Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularium (Nuremburg, 1568).

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Lencker’s ‘Literary Perspective’ was first published in 1567, with a second edition in 1595. This splendidly illustrated work […] with elaborate perspectival designs, beautifully etched by his Nuremberg colleague Matthias Zündt, became the model for a whole generation of artists on perspective, including Jamnitzer and Brunn. Hans Lencker the Elder was one of the most outstanding members of the famous Nuremberg dynasty of goldsmiths and engravers. His works are found in various fields, from enamel drinking vessels to book-bindings (source here.)

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The plates etched by Zündt after Lencker’s designs include nine geometrical figures in perspective, six of which I have excerpted for display here, and twelve plates depicting letters of the alphabet in various perspectival arrangements, the first and last of which follow below.

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Click on the third image above, or the first one below to open a substantially enlarged version of the same; slighter enlargements of the first and sixth of the above images, and the second one below may likewise be opened. My source for all of these images was Prof. Dr. Hebisch’s excellent Mathematischen Café site.

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Mikrokosmos

Every once in a while I check back at the MATEO project website at the University of Mannheim, hoping they may have added more to their already very marvellous selection of digital editions of old, illustrated books. There was nothing new there on my latest visit the other day, but I took a while browsing through the digitised pages of a volume called Microkosmos or Parvus Mundus, an emblem-book published in Antwerp in 1579, written by one Laurentius Haechtanus, with engravings by Gérard de Jode. I snipped out a few of the emblems, as shown below:

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Although each emblem in the book is accompanied by a Biblical quotation, as well as the customary Latin verse, the illustrations in this ‘rare and curious book’ are notably lacking in traditional Christian imagery: their engraver clearly shared in the Renaissance enthusiasm for pagan classical antiquity. Perhaps the single most striking illustration in this respect is that of Prometheus, shown hanging somewhat Christlike from a cross (below).

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Sites such as MATEO leave me to lament my linguistic shortcomings, as I can construe very little of either the Latin texts, or of the German commentaries thereupon. Often, perusing the images makes me feel as though I am participating in a recondite kind of caption-competition, one that I am much too slow-witted to win.

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As my comprehension of Russian is poorer still than my German (i.e. effectively zero), this site, which also features the Mikrokosmos emblems is even more baffling to me: it seems as though it’s some kind of guide to pictorial symbolism. I am easily fascinated, I suppose, by things I don’t understand. Clicking on each of the present images, by the way, will open the relevant Mikrokosmos double-page spread at the Mannheim site.

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Nothing to See Here

You have my apologies for the shortage of notices here recently - I feel a tad guilty, having been shortlisted for that ‘Bloggy’ thing & all (my thanks to those who nominated this journal - you are too kind), that any new visitors drawn to this place thereby will find nothing new to see, and that I am an ungracious host, whose guests are left to their own devices in some dimly-lit reception room, unsure even where to put their coats, scarves, hats, gloves & boots. Well, just put them any old where, and by all means help yourselves to a drink until I get my act together again: we have Swedish vodka, Plymouth gin, cognac, Scotch whisky (single-malt and blended), Canadian whiskey, dark rum, white rum, numerous sweet liqueurs, red & white wine, including one bottle of Prosecco - although if you had your eye on that bottle of Volnay Burgundy, I drank most of that on Friday night. And there is some beer too: Belgian ale, Czech pilsener, Danish Julbier; and a few bottles of English cider.

Yesterday morning I strolled down to the ice-bound harbour thinking I might take a few snapshots - some of which are presented here. It seemed to me that the water had frozen less picturesquely than in winters past - certainly the frigid weather has arrived quite late - so I took only a few pictures, and was soon back home. A little later, we visited three furniture stores, looking at kitchen chairs and tables, eventually settling on one of these and four of these, for which we placed an order, the items not being in stock for immediate collection.

Later in the afternoon I made my way through a couple hundred more pages of the very long book I am reading - I’ll write more about that another time, perhaps.

Click on the images above to see them enlarged.

Optotypes

Eye-test charts featuring letters in descending order of size were first used in tests of visual acuity in the 1840s, but were cast into a reliable and definitive form, one perfectly recognizable today, by the Utrecht ophthamologist Herman Snellen, in 1862.

Snellen’s first ‘optotypes’ used carefully size-adjusted letters based on a squarish typeface called ‘Egyptian Paragon’. Sans-serif lettering became the norm shortly thereafter.

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In the 1870s, Snellen worked to produce variants of his optotypes with calibrated lines and abstract figures that could be used in testing young, or illiterate patients. For a contemporary account of such an endeavour, there is an interesting article here.

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I scanned the images above from ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding, published by the Redstone Press.

Ray Caesar

It was in a post of Signor Mori’s at cipango that I caught my first glimpse of the digital art of Ray Caesar, and I was further reminded of his work thanks to Cup of Chicha, and The Cartoonist, but I still didn’t get around to checking out Mr Caesar’s site, and the image-galleries therein, until he took the trouble to e-mail me about it yesterday, assuming, rightly, that I would be interested.

My work is entirely digital, from its creation to its method of printing. I create models in a three dimensional modeling software and cover these models with painted and manipulated photographic textures that wrap around them like a map on a globe…

I color the models first in a very simple way, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture that may be painted digitally such as a flower petal or from a digital photograph such as a wood surface. I collect textures the way some people collect little silver spoons and I have a story about each texture in my collection…

As my work is printed I am often asked about my original, but it exists only in the computer in a dimensional world of depth, width and height. I am fascinated by the concept that this 3-dimensional space exists much as another reality and even though I turn the computer off, I am haunted by the fact that this space is still there existing in a mathematical probability, and the space that we live in now might not be all that different.

The above is quoted from Mr Caesar’s account of his working methods. If you are likely to be in or near Philadelphia on February 21st, then you really ought to check out Ray’s fascinating work at his debut show, at Tin Man Alley. Click on the images above to see them slightly enlarged: they are reproduced here with the artist’s permission.

Tom Thumb

I found a pair of charming little books in a second-hand place here on Saturday: The Wonderful Life & Adventures of Tom Thumb by Paul Britten Austin. This is a lively re-imagining of the old fairytale, one which relates the intrepid Mr Thumb’s ‘painful experiences in Youth; His glorious Victory at Waterloo [...]; His decoration by H.M. King George. Further, an exact account of how he was Bewitched by a Clockmaker; Was brought to trial on a Grave Charge, and thereafter condemned to one of H.M. Prisons, whence (as is well known) he escaped with the aid of sundry Mice’ etcetera, etcetera. Indeed, the tale as a whole is purportedly ‘related by a mouse.’

The books were published to accompany a series of broadcasts made by Britten Austin in 1954 and ‘55 on Swedish Radio, for the benefit of children learning English, and to that end, each volume has a glossary at the back providing Swedish translations for what were presumed to be the more unfamiliar English words in the text. For example, we see that ‘flabbergast’ is defined as göra flat, mållös and ‘fiddlesticks!’ as dumheter! It occurred to me that the book was rather haphazardly colloquial in a way that could be very difficult for a non-native speaker to follow, but, I learned, this had pretty much been the intention:

…I was working for the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and had written, for my own amusement, a kind of serial trying to evoke, even at cost of pastiche, the general atmosphere of English children’s books I had read as a child. And a friend of mine got the radio people here to use it as a text for a language course on English idioms - Paul Britten Austin (source here).

I supposed at first that the author must have been an embittered hack who had weathered numerous literary disappointments. I based this on the scant evidence of his portrayal of a Critic in the first volume and of a Publisher in the second, as follows:

…a person who went to the Theatre every night because he had to and because he was too lazy to think of any other way of earning his living; and so he revenged himself for his unhappy lot by writing the nastiest things he could think of in the next day’s papers - I, p. 94.

A publisher, dear children, is not an author. Nor is he a printer. In fact, it is difficult to say just what is it he does, apart from putting his name on your book when you have finished it - II, p. 106.

My supposition was as wrong as it was unkind: Tom Thumb was Britten Austin’s first publication - the first of many. His latest books (a volume of Napoleonic history and a translation of Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel Doctor Glas) were published in 2002.

The reason that the books caught my eye in the first place was that the style of the illustrations on their covers seemed familiar, a feeling soon explained when I read that the illustrator was none other than Mervyn Peake. These may not be Peake’s finest works, and indeed they date from a period when his illness was beginning to adversely affect his art, but some of them are delightful, nevertheless. Peake’s involvement also accounts for the fact that the copies of these volumes I saw advertised for sale at abebooks cost roughly a hundred times more than I paid for mine.

Click on the images to see enlarged versions of the same.

One more interesting feature of this publication is its literal treatment of the ‘book-within-a-book’ theme. In the second volume, mention is made of a publication glorying in the title of The History of Blebb and Glugg, the Giant Babies, and how they turned the whole world upside-down. We then find, glued to page 97, a tiny but complete pamphlet, less than an inch high, magnified for the image above, containing this same History.

Some Views from the Office

Here are some photographic views taken earlier today with our new digital camera from in front of the offices where I work. It was decidedly grey - as you can see - and there were some delicate swirls of mist here and there along the water’s edge that I hoped I might capture: alas, these didn’t really show up in the images as they turned out.

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Click on the images to see them nearer their original size…

The camera in question is a Pentax Optio S4:

It’s so tiny!

Before and After the Future

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) is chiefly known, and rightly so, as a futurist artist: between about 1910 to 1930 he produced hundreds of more-or-less abstract studies of motion, colour and form. Yet his pre-futurist work, much of it in a divisionist vein, is often fascinating too, and, whilst his post-futurist paintings are often conventional and sentimental, they are seldom lacking in warmth or charm.

Balla was born and raised in Turin. Although he studied for a short period at a Torinese fine-arts academy, he is supposed, for the most part, to have taught himself how to paint. In 1895 he relocated to Rome, where lived most of the rest of his life. Much of his early work bears the influence of Seurat, and, ca 1902, he began to teach the divisionist techniques he had acquired to two young students, Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni, both of whom would go on to become prominent futurists.

As well as a fascination with formal concerns of colour and light, several of Balla’s canvases from this period suggest a strong social conscience at work, most strikingly, perhaps, in a series of four related works collectively entitled Ciclo dei Viventi, ‘Cycle of the Living’, in which marginalised figures - the madwoman and the sick elderly couple (shown below); the labouring smallholder and the beggar, are depicted with affecting sympathy.

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Boccioni caught the futurist bug in Paris, 1909, from Apollinaire, passing it on to his former teacher the following year. Although Balla effectively signed up to Marinetti’s program in 1910, and produced the electric work below later that year, it wasn’t until 1912 that his work as a futurist began in earnest.

By way of an intermission, some pieces of futurist piano music can be found behind the links in this sentence. They are taken from the futurismusic piano anthology vol. 1 CD on the col legno label, and are performed by Daniele Lombardi.

Balla, like most of the Italian futurists, supported Mussolini and the Fascists, although perhaps less stridently than some. As the 1920s wore on, Balla’s commitment to futurism slowly diminished, and figurative elements began to re-emerge in his paintings beginning ca 1926. Le Frecce della Vita ‘The Arrows of Life’ dating from 1928 (above) is one of his finest late-futurist pieces.

From the 1930s, Balla’s work took on an inimate and a private character. He painted from nature for his own amusement, and he made portraits of his wife, his two daughters, and their friends. Many of the portraits seem influenced, as much as anything, by a kind of Hollywood-style notion of glamour, as for example, in the following piece.

By the late ’30s, as Italy slid toward disaster, Balla had renounced his support for Mussolini’s regime. Some of his wartime works such as La Fila per l’Agnello ‘The Queue for Lamb’, below, show his social conscience of old had not deserted him.

The thread which shines brightest through Balla’s late work, however, is of simple joy in his family, and of their life together, and of his devotion to them. There is one heartbreakingly lovely picture (not shown here) of his elder daughter embracing her mother, who was ill at that time - its title: Non mi Lasciare ‘Don‘t Leave Me.’ The picture below, Noi Quattro nello Specchio ‘Us Four in the Mirror’ shows the family Balla in happier times…

Even though I’ve sidestepped most of Balla’s futurist output here, I should add that I like a good deal of that too. I personally tend to respond to the qualities in certain artists’ personalities, almost regardless of the -isms to which they may subscribe, and there was something congenial and likeable about Balla that comes across from his austere abstractions and his sentimental family portraits alike.

I scanned the images above from my copy of Giovanni Lista’s monograph on Balla, published by the Galleria Fonte d’Abisso in Modena, in 1982. Click on the images to see (much) larger versions of the same.

Prodigiorum

The images below are of woodcut illustrations haphazardly selected from an anthology published in Basel, in 1557, by the Swiss philosopher, theologian and professor of grammar Conrad Lycosthenes (Konrad Wolfhart, 1518-1561): Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon… ab exordio mundi usque ad haec nostra tempora, that is, a Chronicle of Omens and Portents… from the beginning of the world up to these our present times.

Lycosthenes compendiously collected and reproduced hundreds of accounts, both actual and mythical, of omens and prodigies spanning the whole of known history up to that point. His book is presented in full at Mario Gregorio’s fascinating site, which is primarily concerned with the prophecies of Nostradamus.

Also presented at ‘Prophecies on-line’ is a contemporary English translation of Lycosthenes’ book by one Dr Stephen Batman, ominously entitled The Doome, Warning to All Men.

A little further information about Lycosthenes and his book, and a few larger, and clearer images can be found here and here.

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