Proscenium Vitæ Humanæ

I do enjoy perusing the enigmatic engravings of the kind found in old emblem-books, and am delighted whenever I happen upon one of these volumes as scanned or photographed and presented on-line. I was very happy indeed, then, when I discovered that the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, have, as part of their Emblemata Online project, digitised several dozen emblem-books from their extensive collection and have made them available for all to browse.

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The present images are a small handful I lifted from one of these books: Johann Theodor de Bry’s Proscenium vitæ humanæ sive Emblematum Secularium, which was published in Frankfurt, in 1627. This one caught my eye first only because I was familiar with De Bry’s name, having read about him, and his association with the physician, alchemist and author Michael Maier in Yates’ The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and in Klossowski de Rola’s The Golden Game.

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As is the case in the books that De Bry published for Maier, and for Robert Fludd, the engravings here are very finely-executed, and are highly-charged with allegorical meanings which, although guessable in some instances, are at least as often bafflingly opaque. Some of them echo that particular kind of weirdness one associates with Brueghel and Bosch: look closely at the seventh of these emblems, in particular.

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Click on the images to open larger, pop-up versions of the same. Click on the pop-ups, in turn, to link back to the relevant pages at the Herzog August Library site.

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Arcimboldo’s Elements

There follow details from four of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous ‘composed heads’, specifically his paintings personifying the four classical elements: water, air, fire and earth. Click on the details to open the full images, bearing in mind that these are all quite large (> 500Kb).

Arcimboldo painted the original Elements for his patron, the Emperor Maximilian II, in 1566. Of these, only Water and Fire are known to have survived: the Air and Earth pictures shown here are later reworkings of the same themes.

These images are 200dpi scans from my copy of the monograph on Arcimboldo by Roland Barthes, Achille Bonito Oliva and Corinna Ferrari, published by Franco Maria Ricci in 1980.

For more about Arcimboldo, see the displays at Olga’s Gallery, for instance, or at the Web Gallery of Art. Also, check out Mr Rusher’s fine outline of the painter’s life & work, to which he was generous enough to append a kind word about the Giornale Nuovo: my belated thanks for that, Jack.

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The Egyptian Shop

Frustrated by the generally poor quality of fresh produce offered by our local supermarkets, I suggested to my wife one Saturday that we should maybe check out a store called Frukthuset (‘the Fruit-house’) that I’d seen not far from the offices where I work. I hoped that it was maybe a specialist greengrocer, or a fruit-’n’-veg wholesaler.

Well, the Fruit-house turned out to be just another supermarket, and a somewhat dingy one at that, whose produce was scarcely any fresher than the stuff elsewhere. On closer inspection, though, we noticed that many of the other product-lines it carried were quite different from what we could buy anywhere else in town. For example there were cheap bags of pistachios, cans of Anglo-Indian ghee, sheets of frozen filo pastry ‘Made in Sarajevo’, Jordanian soup mixes, Croatian cleaning fluids, German fabric softener, cans of condensed milk with Arabic labels, readymade sauce-mixes with Slavic brand names, Lebanese rose-water, Turkish yoghurt, Moroccan olives, frozen halal meat, cans of delicious Lebanese baklawa, and cardamom-flavoured coffee…

It was evident that this place catered to the local immigrant population, which (I think) comprises mainly Croats, Bosnians, Kosovans, Kurds, Turks & Iranians. At around that time my wife’s Dutch friend Ms D_______ was staying with us. We told her about this place and she said that there were similar establishments in Holland, which people there called ‘Egyptian Shops’. This phrase stuck with us, and, although it is quite unlikely that its proprietors have anything to do with Egypt, we have thought of it as ‘The Egyptian Shop’ ever since.

The cans of butter ghee (first picture, above) were a godsend, very often an excellent starting-point in our increasingly accomplished attempts to put together Indian-style meals. The bottles of rose-water and orange-blossom water (second picture, left) proved useful in some dessert recipes, most notably in a lovely Spanish-style rice-pudding dish we sometimes make. When I was hoping to make some mouhamara, I despaired of finding any pomegranate syrup, until I thought of checking the Egyptian Shop: of course they had some (second picture, right) - I never knew, until then, that that’s what grenadine is…

We’ll also sometimes just pick stuff up for the sake of it, merely because it looks interesting or (to us) unusual or exotic. Hence the can of Lebanese-recipe Foul Medammas (third picture, left - Egyptian and Palestinian recipes are also available), which I haven’t tried yet, and the jar of Basra Date Syrup (third picture, right - actually made in Holland), which I’ve no idea when & where I might use. And sometimes we are tempted to buy familiar things in unfamiliar packages, which accounts for the Šlag-hit (above), a Croatian instant dessert-mix, and the bottle of Arf-brand cleaning fluid (below). It would be hard for me to overstate how much I like Arf as a brand-name, and for that reason alone would love to see this stuff supplant such less-auspiciously-named brands as Vim, and, more especially, Cif, elsewhere in Europe.

It pleases me just to know that there is a supply-line into this place besides the usual, official ones; that there are goods we can obtain besides the standard-issue items printed with instructions for use in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish; and that there are logistical filaments connecting this Baltic port, even if only tenuously, with the Balkans, the Levant, and beyond.

Bark in the Park

I was walking our dog around Admiralty Park on Sunday morning, admiring the trees, and revelling in the variety of the colours and textures of their trunks & branches, noticing the greenness of their lichen or moss patinations, and happily observing the appearence of a first few tentative Springtime buds, when it occurred to me that I should take some photographs to record all of this marvellousness which I could then perhaps later present here on this page.

I ventured out a second time, then, dogless and with camera in hand, as the sun contended with a dilute ghosting of fog, and approached tree after tree, hastily capturing a couple of dozen pictures, but sensing my earlier enthusiasm drain away as I came to feel quite sharply self-conscious about what I was doing, and glad that there were so few people abroad to witness it… Click on the thumbnails above to see the images enlarged.

Anatomia Universa

At the University of Iowa’s John Martin Library’s Rare Book Room there is a copy of the remarkable Anatomia Universa of Paolo Mascagni, whose 44 hand-coloured plates they have scanned and made available for on-line viewing.

The book was published [posthumously - Mascagni died in 1815] in a series of nine parts between 1823 and 1832 at Pisa. Each of the 44 plates in the University of Iowa copy is hand-colored and accompanied by a duplicate outline plate which contains nomenclature for identifying the anatomical parts in the accompanying volume of text. The plates are so large that it has never been bound and is stored in a large book-shaped wooden box especially constructed for that purpose. The plates are so designed that a man five and one-half feet tall can be assembled from three of the plates if they are joined together. The plates were superbly engraved and the hand-coloring by pen and brush was done so carefully and with such skill that the artist often achieved a three-dimensional effect.

Each of the two images above are composites of three of Mascagni’s plates, which I have rather ineptly spliced together, hence the visible ‘joins’. Click on the relevant potions of the images to see the individual plates in isolation.

The Da Costa Hours

I browsed my way to the Pierpoint Morgan library’s website earlier today, and found my eye drawn to the pages on display there from an illuminated manuscript known as the Da Costa Hours, after the book’s second owner, one Álvaro Da Costa, armourer to King Manuel the Fortunate of Portugal. Details from each of the twelve calendar images in this manuscript follow below.

This Book of Hours, which was produced in Bruges, ca 1515, was one of several illuminated by the Flemish painter Simon Bening (1483/4-1561).

Bening was the last great Flemish illuminator, and he capitalized on the current taste for large Calendar miniatures, taking them to their limit by making them full-page… Bening was known for his naturalistic depictions of figures and landscapes. He was a great observer of detail, including fabrics, the objects and events of daily life, and even weather conditions… [His] fame was widespread in his lifetime, and his creations were much sought after, not only in Belgium, but also in Italy, Germany, and Portugal - source here.

Simon Bening revolutionized the pictorial language used in calendar miniatures. He attached as much importance to calendar decoration as to the detailed programmes of devotional miniatures which usually followed them. Bening […] was the only artist in his century who painted full-page calendar miniatures, and he was the first to treat them as independent depictions which, to his mind, should convey a life-like picture of the environment.

Bening also was the only artist before Pieter Brueghel the Elder to explore landscapes in a systematic way. He painted different landscape types in a stunning topographic diversity and also described the most different weather conditions. His landscapes are lyrical, observed with sensitivity, composed in detail and full of atmosphere. They are Bening’s important contribution to the increasing prestige attributed to Flemish landscape painting - source here.

Click on the details above to see the images enlarged and in full.

Bresdin

I first heard of Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) in connection with the life and work of Odilon Redon: the former was a friend and teacher to the latter, and exercised a formative influence on his artistic outlook.

From Bresdin, Redon learned both to etch and to make lithographs. Stylistically, Bresdin’s intricate mazes of detailed imagery offered little influence to the future course of Redon’s art, but Bresdin’s insistence upon exploration of the artist’s personal visions and dreams takes us firmly to the world of Redon. More than anything, Bresdin gave Redon the courage to follow his own feelings - source here.

I had only ever seen a couple of Bresdin’s prints and so was delighted to find an on-line exhibition devoted to his work at the Bibliothèque National de France’s website. This tied in with a pictures-on-walls show staged at the library in the summer of 2000, & so is hardly news, but I was nevertheless grateful for the chance to spend an hour or two browsing around it the other day.

Bresdin worked exclusively in the monochrome media of drawings, etchings, and lithographs. His compositions are oftenest crowded and intricate, presenting us with thickly overgrown forests, for example, or busy battle scenes, or cluttered interiors. His etchings were likened to Dürer’s but were more directly inspired, we are told, by the work of Rembrandt, and Callot.

There are a few very brief biographical notes on Bresdin out there, which collectively present an intruguing but sketchy composite portrait of an evidently fascinating man: ‘a true Bohemian, Bresdin for years lived alone in a forest hut, with his copper plates and a pet rabbit’; he dressed outlandishly, and his habits were bizarre, for example ‘he used to take walks with a white rabbit on a lead’; He was greatly admired by Beaudelaire, Mallarmé and Courbet; Despite ‘enormous success’ he ’remained poor all his life’; He lived in Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and spent some years in Québec before returning to settle in Sèvres; He fathered seven children…

Click on the cropped images above to see them full-frame: alas, whilst Bresdin’s work invites microscopic scrutiny, these images are on the small side.

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Here are a few more of Bresdin’s graphic works. Above are two peasant interiors, and below, two images of the Holy Family almost lost amidst implausibly luxuriant vegetation. Again, click on the details to see the images in full.

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Floating Fruit

The engravings in Johann Christoph Volckamer’s 2-volume opus Nürnbergische Hesperides (1708/1714) bring to us a surreal parade of Bavarian and Italian locales above which enormous citrus fruit hover ominously…

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Some of the fruit are intact, whilst others have been neatly sliced in half as though by some vast, unseen blade. One imagines British Naval agents being dispatched to Nuremburg to discover if there could be any way of exploiting these gargantuan floating citrus reservoirs in the fight against scurvy.

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Volckamer’s prints were made during a period in which it was fashionable among the aristocracy in Central Europe to grow these Mediterranean fruits despite the cold winter climate. Wealthy people built tall greenhouses or ‘orangeries’ to shelter the trees during the winter, and had the plants moved outdoors in the summer. […]The prints follow a distinctive format, in which prize varieties of citrus fruits in monumental scale float in the sky above bird’s-eye views, or the plants tower over Lilliputian landscapes of the formal gardens, palazzos and country houses where they were grown. The places shown are in Nuremberg and northern Italy, especially around Verona. Each specimen is decorated with a ribbon bearing its name. The prints were engraved by various artists - source here.

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I lifted the present images from this page. Click on the pictures to see them slightly enlarged. When I look at the second of them, I can’t help but be reminded of a certain painting…