Tents and Pyjamas

In addition to the usual kinds of unsolicited e-mail, which attempts to interest me in reasonably-priced pharmaceuticals, lurid porn-sites, and the like, I also regularly receive notifications of up-coming events in the nightclubs of São Paolo, and, more recently, business proposals from Chinese manufacturers. On three occasions over the past six months or so, I have received a message from a Mr Z____, marketing director of the Xia Men Jiao Xia Trade Co., worded as follows:

To Whom It May Concern,

We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents. We have been in the tent manufacturing business for many years and are currently in the process of expanding and our customer base. We are quite excited about contacting you and the potential for establishing friendly business relations with you as well as sharing the mutual benefits.

I would like to formally announce to the internet that I am not interested in tents; have never been interested in tents, and, in all likelihood, will never be interested in tents. In fact, I am strongly opposed to the idea of tents. I am anti-tent; a discon-tent. While I concede their utility for those who lack a roof over their heads, or those who enjoy sleeping in fields, forests & the like, I am thankful that I suffer no such need or inclination.

A couple of notes on the entry below reminded me that this publication has received some nominations in the first European Weblog Awards, aka, the Satin Pajamas. I wonder why these European awards are using the US spelling of pyjamas? My thanks to those who nominated or voted for the Giornale. By all means go along there and vote (ideally, for someone other than me) if these award things float your boat. I find I am a reassuring distance off the pace in the results so far…

Figurative Alphabets

Just as there are pictures composed of letters: calligrams, for example; there are, inversely, letters made from pictures. An interesting sub-set of the latter are those alphabets contrived out of human figures…

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There are many examples of figurative initials in mediæval manuscripts. One of the earliest known alphabets wholly drawn in such a way is that of Giovannino de Grassi (active 1389-98), as detailed in the first of the two images above. The second image shows part of an engraved 15th Century alphabet, strongly reminiscent of de Grassi’s, executed by a German artist known only as ‘Master E.S.’ (active ca. 1450-67), after the initials found on several of his prints.

Geofroy Tory (ca. 1480-1533) was a printer, designer and engraver best known today for his book Champ Fleury, ‘wherein he explains and illustrates the theory governing his designs of Roman capitals.’ These designs, in the best Renaissance fashion, derive from human proportions, and such derivations are illustrated in the book, as in the latters A and H pictured above.

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A complete figurative alphabet was published by one Peter Flötner (ca. 1485-1546) in 1534. In Flötner’s alphabet, naked or nearly-naked figures are posed singly or disposed in pairs to form the various letters. Unlike de Grassi’s alphabet, we find only human figures here, no other animals. And unlike Tory’s illustrations, these letters seem an end in themselves, rather than the means of demonstrating a design strategy. Flötner’s alphabet was imitated by other engravers. The letters G and N above are reproduced from an alphabet published by one Martin Weygel in Bavaria in 1560. Weygel’s alphabet can be found complete at this site.

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Giovanni Battista Braccelli, creator of the mysterious Bizzarie di Varie Figuri, was also responsible, we learn, for the design of a figurative alphabet (in 1632). Another odd alphabet, which, alas, I have been unable to find entire, is that by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718), entitled Alfabeto in Sogno (Dream Alphabet), in which each figurated letter is illustrated together with other items meant to suggest or exemplify a word beginning with that same letter. For example, D stands for Diligenza, or, perhaps, Disembodied Ears! Mitelli, like Flötner, is also notable for his creation of a design for a deck of cards…

Had I the stamina, I could continue with further examples from the 18th through to the 20th century, with the figurative alphabets produced varying from the surpassingly elegant to the crudely indecent (for more examples of the latter, see Max Bruinsma’s essay on The Erotics of Type.) For further related reading, see these sites.

Judith Schaechter

I’m grateful to Judith Schaechter for her e-mail of a few days ago, which led me back to some images of her work (a few of which I’ve reproduced below) at the Philadelphia-based missionCREEP site. Ms Schaechter is an artist whose preferred medium is that of stained glass…

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I guess it can all be chalked up to phototropism. I took stained glass as an elective in art school (I was a painting major at the time) and haven’t quit yet. […] Ironically, I find my “artistic voice” is liberated only by the severest of technical restrictions. The more monotonous and difficult a process, the more exciting I find it. Incidentally, for this reason I’ve always found the process of painting intolerable. Nothing is more horrible than a blank canvas and nothing more easily filled with meaningless, arty brush strokes. […] Another major reason I stick with stained glass is because I think the raw material is pretty. The uncut sheets of colored glass are really seductive, awesome, and unarguably lovely things. Naturally, the temptation to cut and damage all that pristine beauty is too much for me to resist.

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The foregoing is extracted from Ms Schaechter’s account of her method & motivations at the missionCREEP site. I very much like the look of these works even as smallish JPEGs, but, someday, I’d love to see them close-up in good, natural light. Any of you who will be in Philadelphia next month (between the 4th and the 27th) will be able to get a good look at a few of them at the Nexus gallery, where a missionCREEP group show is to be staged.

Click on the images to see them slightly enlarged. The works pictured are Copyright © Judith Schaechter, and are reproduced here with permission.

Update, July ’07. Judith has informed me that there is a new website devoted to her work: see it here.

Aldrovandi’s Watercolours

I was reminded of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) after reading Isaac D’Israeli’s mention of him, in his article on the “Poverty of the Learned,” wherein he laments that the great naturalist “was suffered to die in the hospital of that city to whose fame he had eminently contributed.” The implication being, I guess, that one only died in an hospital if one were too poor to expire in relative comfort at home, surrounded by ones family, and were obliged instead to fall back on public charity.

D’Israeli’s anecdotes, alas, are not always as reliable as they are diverting, and, as with anything you might read at this website, are best taken with a pinch of salt. Other sources cast doubt on Aldrovandi’s having been reduced to poverty at all. Whatever the truth of the matter, the event in question took place four hundred years ago, an anniversary that will not pass unmarked in Italy.

Aldrovandi’s magnum opus, only partially realised during his lifetime, was to be an encyclopædic publication encompassing everything that was then known about natural history. The work’s illustrations were to be drawn from the hundreds of watercolour paintings that Aldrovandi had commissioned from a number of artists, over a period of some thirty years. As part of their on-line presentation of Aldrovandi’s work, the University of Bologna have scanned a large number of these watercolours, a few of which I have selected for display here.

Plants, sea-creatures, serpents, birds, domestic beasts, exotic creatures, ‘monsters’ (deformed animals, freaks of nature, conjoined twins, etc.) are all depicted in these watercolours, as are fantastic fauna, such as dragons, whose existence one supposes had not yet been altogether disproved. Many of the paintings are very beautifully and vividly executed. I’m particularly impressed by the pair of entwined snakes, above, which, whilst I can hardly vouch for their zoological verisimilitude, appear very much alive.

Click on the details to see the relevant manuscript pages in full. Note that I have deliberately ignored the warning on the University of Bologna pages to the effect that it is forbidden to reproduce or duplicate images taken from manuscripts viewable at their site without written permission, but I will undertake to remove these images if anyone objects to their presence here.

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Nobson Central

British artist Paul Noble has received widespread international recognition for his monumental eight-year project—the meticulous depiction of a fictional city called Nobson Newtown. Noble is a master draughtsman, whose wall-sized drawings offer aerial perspectives over a fantastical cityscape that echoes the visionary ethos of projects such as the Garden City Movement—source here.

…Nobson Newtown and its environs might owe something to Dickens’s Coketown, to Viz comics, to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and his graphic work for Monty Python […] Nobson, too, is built on words. Many of Noble’s blocky, modernist-looking houses […] are derived from Nobfont, a geometric typographic font also invented by the artist. […]The 3x4m drawing Nobson Central presents acres of ruination that might belong in bombed-out Baghdad or Kabul or an earthquake zone, row upon row of what appear to be modernist slums, concrete dwellings whose walls are breached and pocked, their flat roofs gone.

[…] The configuration of the rows upon rows of buildings actually spells out the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But why board up the windows of a house whose walls are open? Why put out the neatly tied binbags when everywhere is rubbish strewn? The details are terrific: clods of concrete writhe and dangle like bad sculpture on twisted stanchions, a perky satellite dish points skyward, a trellis hangs on a side wall (perhaps waiting for Eliot’s April lilacs), a pipe pumps muck, uselessly, from shell-hole to midden. Whether all this devastation was wrought by friendly bombs, unfriendly builders or enemy mortars we shall never know—source here.

Nobson is a new town with old customs and beliefs, complete with chemical works, quarry, slums and a palace by the sea. There is also a hospital (Nobspital) and a building called Trev—source here.

The origins of this ‘exercise in self-portraiture via town planning’ lie in the painstaking design of a special font based on the forms of classic modernist architecture. Variously described as ‘3-D Scrabble tiles’ or ‘Lego blocks’, Noble’s pictograms name the buildings that they depict. From the hospital (Nobspital) to the cemetery (Nobsend) via the town centre (Nobson Central) or the Mall, citations from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, Gerard Winstanley’s letters to Oliver Cromwell or T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland are camouflaged within the fields, the trees or the brickwork. Noble’s project embodies a complex infrastructure of civil planning, social policies and historical perspectives—source here.

I owe my discovery of Noble’s work to a recent entry at Cipango. The images above I took from a book entitled Nobson Central, whose 200 pages are entirely given over to close-up details of this single elaborate drawing. The first and last of the present images are scans of the front and back covers of the book, while the remaining images are a selection of sections of details from its pages. These images are Copyright © 2000 Paul Noble, and have been reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence here.

Curiosities of Literature

I think it was in one of Arthur Machen’s memoirs that I first learned of Isaac D’Israeli’s book Curiosities of Literature. If I recall correctly, Machen mentioned it as one of the volumes in which he had found solace during his first, unhappy years in London. Several years later, during mine & my wife’s first trip to Stockholm, I stopped at an Antikvariat who just so happened to have a one-volume edition—bound in rather garishly-marbled boards trimmed with red leather—of the Curiosities on their shelves. I bought it and took it back to the cottage we were renting at Stavsnäs.

The first volume of Curiosities of Literature was published in 1791, and, over the following thirty-odd years, five further volumes appeared. The completed work comprises (if I counted them right) some two hundred and eighty-five separate essays, most of them quite brief, covering all manner of miscellaneous topics, such as, just to give some examples: Men of genius deficient in conversation; On the custom of saluting after sneezing; Metempsychosis; History of gloves; Literary blunders; and Drinking customs in England.

It’s such a richly diverting book, and one not to be found (to the best of my knowledge) anywhere on the internet, so I have decided to start up a separate weblog at this site specifically dedicated to serially re-publishing the Curiosties on-line, essay by essay. I’ve posted the first three essays already: Libraries, Bibliomania, and Literary Journals, and many more will follow (I hope), to appear at a rate of at least one essay per week (depending on my available time & enthiusiasm.)

The Late Max Ernst

Below are images of some more paintings by Max Ernst (1891-1976). Once again, I have lifted them from my copy of Edward Quinn’s 1977 monograph on the artist. These are an arbitrary selection of paintings from the artist’s old age…

The first two pictures, those immediately above and below, were painted in 1965. The previous year, Ernst and his wife Dorothea Tanning had moved from Paris to a house at Seillans, in the South of France. 1965 saw Ernst return to the collage technique for the first time in many years.

In 1969, Ernst was painting abstract canvases, like the one below, and was meanwhile producing collage-based graphic works. The same year, a large retrospective exhibition of his works was staged in Stockholm.

A painter may know what he does not want. But woe betide him if he wants to know what he does not want! A painter is lost if he finds himself.

The fact that he has succeeded in not finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only ‘achievement’ - Max Ernst, 1967.

Even as an octogenarian, Ernst continued to work, busy on series of lithographs, collages and paintings. In 1972 he was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of Bonn, where he had studied between 1910 and 1914. The final three paintings shown here were all completed in 1974. Max Ernst died in Paris on April 1st 1976.

If you like these pictures, and can make it to New York between April 7th and July 10th this year, then you should check out the exhibition planned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art which will feature 180 of Ernst’s paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, and illustrated books.

Click on the images to see them enlarged…