A Map of Schlaraffenland

In the latest issue of FMR magazine, there is an article by Giorgio Mangani on ‘Cartographic Oddities’. The aberrant maps discussed in the piece are of the same kinds as in this list of curiosities held by the Yale University Library. Rather unreasonably, I found myself faintly disappointed; wishing that the oddities had been odder still, and the curiosities even curiouser. One of the illustrations in the magazine caught my eye, however, a map of Schlaraffenland.

Schlaraffenland was a utopian country, a Land of Cockaigne, originally described in a satire by one Johann Andreas Schnebelin (d. 1706). It is a place where ‘chickens, geese, and pigeons fly around already cooked and waiting to be eaten, and every house is surrounded by a hedge of sausage’. A number of maps of this country were apparently produced between 1700 and 1750. The one pictured here was published by Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremburg in 1716.

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Besides Schlaraffenland proper, shown in the first of the two images above, the map depicts other countries on the same imaginary continent, including Mammonia; a Republic of Veneria; Bibonia, land of Booze; and a Great Empire of the Stomach, Magni Stomachi Imperium. All the common vices have their place: there is even an Island of Tobacco. To the east and west of these lands are, respectively, the Kingdoms of Youth and of Old Age. To the North there is Terra Sancta Incognita, the ‘unknown country of the pious’, while a hotter region lies to the south….

Click on the images above to see them enlarged.

Hoefnagel & Hoefnagel’s Archetypa

In Frankfurt in 1592, one Jacob Hoefnagel, then still just nineteen years old, produced a book of fifty-two engravings based on paintings by his father Joris. The book’s full Latin title translates as: Archetypes and verses by Joris Hoefnagel, his father, are presented, engraved in copper under the guidance of his genius, and freely communicated in friendship to all lovers of the Muses by his son Jacob. The book comprised four sections, each with its own title-page and a dozen engravings of assorted flora and fauna. There follows a selection of images scanned from a reprint of the book produced by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, in 1994.

Joris Hoefnagel was born in Antwerp, in 1542, into a wealthy merchant family. He attended University in Bourges, and Orléans, but religious turmoil cut his studies short. He was in Spain (on business) between 1563 and 1567: his earliest known sketches date from this period. He then spent two years in England before returning to Antwerp in 1570. He was married there the following year, and Jacob, his first child, was born in 1573. He left Antwerp again in 1575, travelling first to Venice, where he received his first artistic commission: to sketch views of the city for an atlas. He visited Germany for the first time the following year, securing an appointment as court painter for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. Before settling in Munich, however, the artist continued his travels, spending time in Rome and Naples in 1577.

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Hoefnagel remained in Munich until the Counter-Reformation occasioned a change for the worse in the prevailing religious climate, one which obliged him to leave for Frankfurt (in 1591). As he changed cities, he exchanged patrons, leaving the service of Albrecht’s successor Wilhelm V for that of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. The artist spent three or four years in Frankurt before yet another religious dispute uprooted him: it is thought that he settled next in Vienna, where he lived and worked until his death in 1600 or 1601. Jacob Hoefnagel’s biography is no less eventful: after his father’s death he lived variously in Italy, Prague and Sweden, and seemingly spent as much of his time entangled in financial quarrels of various kinds as he did painting or engraving.

The Archetypa is notable as one of the earliest books in which plants, and, more especially, insects (and other coldbloods) were depicted with any degree of ‘scientific’ accuracy. Even so, it would be a stretch to consider it a prototypical work of natural history, as Hoefnagel’s compositions are highly contrived and artificial. A few of the beasties depicted therein, moreover, are still drawn as much from imagination as from observation. The Archetypa was, we are told, widely used as a source-book by other artists, and its influence can apparently be traced throughout 17th-Century still-life painting.

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Each of the Archetypa’s engravings includes a couple of Latin mottoes or verses, and this combination of text and image also lends the work an emblematic quality. The texts are often pious, devotional, or cautionary: many are Biblical or Classical quotations, others were devised by (Joris) Hoefnagel himself. The motto heading the engraving below states, for instance This variety in the ornament of the world: this is the glory of the highest artist. And, on the engraving above: Let us not investigate God’s works inquisitively using human reasoning; but, guided by the works, let us admire instead the artist.

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Click on the images above to see them much enlarged… For more of Hoefnagel’s work see this previous Giornale entry, or browse through these images from the holdings of the US National Gallery of Art.

Empty Offices

I’ve spent a good deal of time at my place of work this past month: rather more than I would have liked, to be honest. There’s not much one could say in favour of working on weekends, except that there’s a certain something about the atmosphere of a deserted office (or of any normally busy place fallen temporarily silent) that appeals to me. When I was here the Sunday morning before last, almost alone, I took a few pictures of the place…

There is always someone somewhere in the building: it’s a 24 / 7 / 365 operation, and this was one of only a very few occasions when I can recall having seen it so quiet. The first picture, top-left above, is a deliberately-blurred shot of my computer monitor. The next two pictures are both views from the desk where I sit, and the remaining image above is of a meeting-area elsewhere in the building.

The four pictures above highlight the split-level, semicircular aspect of the building, which, I would have to admit, is probably the pleasantest place of work I have known in my not especially illustrious career. The first two pictures below are of the office where I first sat when I worked here: some reorganization has left it temporarily empty, seemingly doubly-deserted on a Sunday morning. Lastly, below, are two close-ups of a small bronze sculpture in a window in the building’s reception-area.

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Taking a Break

I’ve been short on time & out of ideas this past week, and am likely to be busy for a few weeks more, so I’ll be taking an extended break from writing this Giornale. As a parting shot, here is one more enigmatic image from Johann Theodor de Bry’s Proscenium vitæ humanæ sive Emblematum Secularium (previously mentioned here): I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to represent…

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