Mitelli’s Games

I’ve already written a couple of entries about the Bolognese graphic artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718), but wanted to add a third to highlight one specific aspect of his work: that of game-design. Mitelli designed and published dozens of card-games, dice-games and board-games…

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I mentioned previously that Mitelli had produced a deck of tarot cards, Il gioco di Tarocchini (‘The game of Tarocchini;’ see the first of the two images above). Besides this tarot, Mitelli designed at least one other card-game, Il gioco di Passatempo (where passatempo simply means ‘pastime’) The second of the details above shows two of the forty cards from this game, where half the cards are Trionfi (‘trumps’) representing the virtues, and other positive traits; and the other half Cartazze, (‘bad cards,’ I think) representing the vices, etc., which are of lesser value in the game.

The preceding image is a detail from a board-game: Il gioco delle Monete—‘the Game of Coins.’ Click on the detail to see the game-board in full. The rules of play are printed at the bottom of the page: sadly, my Italian isn’t good enough to venture a translation. While the coin-game is played with two dice, Mitelli designed a number of games to be played with three, such as the two that follow, Il Gioco Importantissimo del Fornaro (‘The Very Important Game of the Baker’), and Il Gioco dei Mestieri (‘The Game of Trades’).

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Of particular historical interest is Mitelli’s 1712 Il Gioco Nuovo di Tutte le Osterie (‘The New Game of All the Hostelries’), a board game where each square represents one of Bologna’s inns or eating-houses. Every osteria is represented by its sign, under which Mitelli has noted a particular speciality of the establishment. For example, in the details that follow below, we see that L’Orso was known for its Buon Vin Dolce ‘good sweet wine,’ whereas L’Angelo was noted for Buone Sfoglie ‘good pastries.’

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As before, my source for these images was my copy of Le Collezioni d’Arte della Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna: Le Incisioni; Vol. I., edited by Franca Varignana. Click on the details above to see the images in full.

Free Books at Easter

Presented to you in association with the Easter Bunny™: here is the sixth of my occasional free book giveaways. Take a look at the books listed below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments on this entry to see if it has been claimed by anyone yet. If not, then leave a comment stating which book you want: include your e-mail address in the comment. Next, send me your mailing address in an e-mail. I’ll decide who gets what (usually it’s first-come, first-served), and I’ll mail the books in a few days’ time. I’ll pay all postage costs. The offer is restricted to one book per recipient.

1. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. I’ve been intrigued by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for years, so naturally I was curious when I read about this novel, a thriller of sorts whose plot revolves around two college students’ discovery of hidden meanings encoded in that mysterious book. I found the story passably entertaining, and quite impressively well-done considering that the two authors wrote most of the novel while still college students themselves. My copy is of the UK hardcover edition published by Century last year; 372pp; ISBN: 1844130053.

2. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms, with an introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine and a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges. I’d read only good things about Bioy Casares’s slim novel, but was not particularly impressed when I came to read it. Then again, what do I know, when Borges and Octavio Paz both reckoned it ‘perfect?’ My copy is the 112pp paperback published by NYRB Classics; ISBN: 1590170571.

3. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. In need of something to read on a train journey, I picked this book up at Malmö railway station just before Christmas. It’s the intense and rather cruel tale of Erica Kohut, the Viennese piano teacher of the title, whose love-hate relationship with her domineering mother is put under impossible stress when one of her students attempts to seduce her. This is a cheap-&-nasty UK paperback (288pp) edition published by Serpent’s Tail, released to tie in with the 2001 movie based on the novel. ISBN: 1852427507.

4. The Huanted Woman by David Lindsay, with an afterword by Douglas Anderson. This 1922 novel by the author of A Voyage to Arcturus is part haunted-house story, part symbolist romance: an unusual blend for an English novel. I found it moderately interesting, but was a little irritated by the book’s po-faced tone, and ended up disliking its protagonists. This is a hardcover edition published by the Tartarus Press, in a limited run of 300 copies (208pp). ISBN: 1872621821.

5. Viriconium by M. John Harrison. This volume collects Harrison’s four books set in that imaginary city: Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. The former books are formulaic genre novels, albeit well-written ones with some striking twists. More interesting are the latter two, which offer a fascinating and multi-faceted view into a unique imaginary locale. This is a shoddily-made UK paperback, 562pp; ISBN: 1857989953.

6. The Seed, by Davide de Angelis. The blurb on the front cover reads: ‘De Angelis’s prose is as vital, weird and as devious as his image-making. Enthralling!’—David Bowie. Alas, after reading a couple of pages of prose like this: ‘Her grip tightened around my arms and the ground beneath our feet rippled with MindJadium’s anger. We stared into his lethal dynamics.’ I just felt a bit queasy, & could not go on. This is a UK paperback edition, courtesy of Creation books; 192pp; ISBN: 1840681144.

7. Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem. This is a comprehensive history of Kabbalah, written in a fairly dry, academic style: a useful reference for anyone interested in last year’s surprise religious fad. In this case the cover blurb is not at all misleading: ‘A definitive history of the evolution, ideas, leading figures and extraordinary influence of Jewish mysticism.’ This is a 494pp paperback edition; ISBN: 0452010071.

8. Fantasy-Pieces in Callot’s Manner: Pages from the Diary of a Travelling Romantic by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated from the German, and with an introduction by Joseph M. Hayse. This was Hoffmann’s debut collection of tales, and this volume contains two pieces translated into English for the first time: ‘The Mesmerist’ and ‘A Report on the Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza,’ as well as the more famous ‘The Golden Pot’ and several pieces of ‘Kreisleriana,’ etc. I found this collection only intermittently interesting, and was dismayed by the sour misogyny in a couple of the tales. This is a US hardcover, 350pp; ISBN: 0912756284.

9. A Citizen of the Country, by Sarah Smith. This novel is the third of Smith’s Vanished Child trilogy. I bought this volume not having read the others, but it works quite well as a stand-alone tale. It’s an elaborately-plotted story set in France and Belgium in 1911 in which Alexander Reisden is drawn into perilous intrigues revolving around his childhood friend André, a tortured soul who stages Grand Guignol theatre, and André’s wife Sabine, who is suspected of being a witch… this is a 480pp UK paperback edition; ISBN: 0099410826.

10. Orosz István: a catalogue of graphic works by the Hungarian graphic artist I wrote about here a half-dozen entries ago. I ordered what I thought were a couple of books about Orosz from a Danish gallery, without realising that they were the same book just with two different-colour covers. This volume includes more than fifty of Orosz’s works, with texts in English and Hungarian. It’s a paperback with 64pp. There is no ISBN.

Bishop Wilkins’s Ark

Bishop John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), has enjoyed a revival of interest in recent years, thanks on one hand to the researches of Umberto Eco, who discusses the Essay at length in his book In Search of the Perfect Language, and on the other to the endeavours of Neal Stephenson, in whose Baroque Cycle of novels, Wilkins features as a character. The second part of the Essay is an ‘enumeration and description of all those things and notions to which names are to be assigned:’ that is, an attempt to provide a structured classification for every possible noun.

In Part 2, Chapter V, Wilkins enumerates and describes the animal kingdom, which he subdivides into imperfect creatures (invertebrates) and perfect ones, where the latter are further split into the categories of fishes, birds and beasts. To this taxonomy, Wilkins appends a curious digression, explaining how, in his opinion—and contrary to the views of ‘some hereticks of old, and some Atheistical scoffers in these later times,’—all of the world’s beasts could have easily been accommodated in Noah’s Ark, as described in Genesis, 6/15. On the crucial question of how many sorts of beasts or birds there are in the world, Wilkins optimistically reckons that ‘it will appear that they are much fewer then is commonly imagined, not a hundred sorts of Beasts, nor two hundred of Birds.’

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There is even an illustration (of which the pair of images above are details) depicting an exterior view of the Ark as Wilkins imagines it, along with a plan view of its interior. It is an ugly and impractical-looking vessel, an enormous floating barn. Its seaworthiness seems questionable, but, Wilkins claims, ‘tis not likely that in the time of the deluge, when the whole Earth was overflowed, that there should be any such rough and boisterous winds as might endanger a Vessel of this Figure; such winds usually proceeding from dry Land.’ He takes greater pains to assure the reader that its capacity was sufficient for the several hundred species in question, and for their food, which should have included, according to his calculations, 40,500 solid cubits of compressed hay, and, for the ‘rapacious beasts,’ 1,825 sheep.

It is plain in the description which Moses gives of the Ark that it was divided into three stories, each of them ten cubits or fifteen foot high, besides one cubit allowed for the declivity of the roof in the upper story. And ’tis agreed upon as most probable, that the lower story was assigned to contein all the species of beasts, the middle story for their food, and the upper story, in one part of it, for the birds and their food, and the other part for Noah, his family and utensils.

I lifted the quotations above from the on-line edition of the Essay (see the fifth link in the first paragraph). Refer to pages 162-8 for the digression concerning the Ark. The tables and images (the last two having nothing to do, by the way, with the Ark) were scanned from my copy of the Thoemmes Press edition of the book. Click on the details to see them in full.

The Ship of Fools

I first meant to write something about Sebastian Brant’s 1494 book Das Narrenschiff (aka Stultifera Navis, or ‘The Ship of Fools’) a couple of years ago, but, at the time I don’t think I could find a good, complete set of its woodcuts on-line. I guess I can’t have looked all that hard though, since the Library of the University of Houston’s website has been presenting a marvellous set of cuts from the 1497 Latin edition of the book since 2002. An e-mail from a reader (Thanks, Mark) a couple of months ago reminded me about the book, and renewed my interest in writing about it.

Brant was born in 1457 (or ’58), in Strasbourg. His family was not wealthy, but managed to provide him with an excellent education. In 1475 he went to university in Basel, and remained in that city until 1501. At first he studied philosophy, but later took up legal studies. He obtained a licence to practice and teach law in 1484, and gained a doctorate another five years later. In the 1480s Brant developed an enthusiasm for literature, and wrote a good deal of verse in Latin, and, later, in German. Much of Brant’s earlier work was satiric, condemning the vices and follies of his time, and found publication in pamphlet form.

In Das Narrenschiff, Brant presented a more sustained and systematic satire on contemporary life as he saw it. The book comprises more than a hundred sections, each one concerned with a particular variety of folly. Each section consists of a brief motto, a woodcut illustration, and a few dozen lines of verse. Here and there, Brant introduces an overarching theme of a doomed voyage of all the fools to the land of Narragonia (a region that can be doubtless be found not too far from Schlaraffenland). Brant was both politically and religiously conservative: an upright, censorious prig, who nevertheless invested great liveliness in his lampoons. Also, to his credit, Brant didn’t exclude himself from his survey of foolishness.

The book was a great success, and was followed by dozens of other editions, adaptations and translations (into Latin, Low German, French, Dutch, Flemish and English). Especially significant was the Latin adaptation (Stultifera Navis) prepared by Brant’s pupil Jacob Locher in 1497. The first English version The Ship of folys of the worlde… was the work of a priest & poet named Alexander Barclay, and appeared ca. 1509. Brant lived to supervise a sixth official edition of his book. After 1501 he returned to his native Strasbourg, where he took up a prestigious municipal post. He died there in 1521.

It is unlikely that Das Narrenschiff would be much remembered had it been published unillustrated. Brant’s verse, while not always without merit, is often plain doggerel. The book’s woodcuts,however, continue to fascinate, even after half a millennium. Stylistic variation among the illustrations indicates that several artists contributed designs. Some modern authorities have attributed the best of them to the hand of the young Albrecht Dürer. The artist is known to have spent time in Basel between 1492 and 1494, and, some years later, produced a portrait of Brant.

At first, I planned to copy images from the University of Houston’s library’s site to illustrate this entry. For once, I took heed of a Copyright notice, and contacted them before doing so. I was dismayed, but not entirely surprised when the reply came back that they would only permit reproduction of two images from their pages, and those unaltered. I can’t help thinking it a particular folly of our times that a university library wants thus to restrict the diffusion of images from a book printed over five-hundred years ago.

Fortunately for me, Dover Publications offer a fine edition of The Ship of Fools translated into modern English, and with illustrations which are ‘part of Dover’s Pictorial Archive Series and may be used by commercial artists free of charge.’ The images above are scanned from my copy of this edition: click on them to see them enlarged.

I know it, I confess to God
Of folly I was never free,
I’ve joined the fool’s fraternity.
I pull the cap which I would doff,
Yet my fool’s cap will not come off…

From Brant’s Apology of the Poet, translated by Edwin H. Zeydel.

Malpertuis

Last week I read Jean Ray’s 1943 gothic novel Malpertuis. I ordered a copy after reading Michael Cisco’s effusive praise of the book, which he calls ‘A Pagan and Catholic and Gothic and Carnivalesque and Modernist and Surrealist Tragedy.’ The quotations that follow are taken from the translation by Iain White, published by the Atlas Press (pictured left).

Now that I must describe Malpertuis I find myself stricken with a strange impotence. The image recedes like the castles of Morgan le Fay; the brush becomes like lead in the painter's hand; so many things I would wish to fix by description or definition vanish, become vague and dissolve into misty nothingness.

There it stood with its enormous pillared balconies, its flights of steps flanked with heavy stone banisters, its cruciferous turrets, its germinate barred windows, its grimacing, sculptured child-eating serpents and tarasques, its studded doors. […] Its façade was a severe mask in which the beholder vainly sought any serenity, a face feverishly twisted in rage and anguish that fails to conceal the abominations that lie behind it.

Jean Ray was one of several noms-de-plume assumed by the Belgian writer Raymond Jean-Marie de Kremer (1887-1964). Ray was a prolific author who wrote journalistic pieces, stories in Flemish (as John Flanders), stories for young readers (under a variety of pseudonyms), scenarios for comic strips (including, from about 1948, Tintin), and about a hundred booklet-sized instalments of the Adventures of Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes. Malpertuis, Ray wrote, was the product of ‘ten years, perhaps twelve, of nights and voyages, over the whole world. I wrote, discarded, burnt, then the scissors and the glue-pot came into play with the survivors.’ It is regarded as its author’s finest work.

The story begins with the theft of a collection of manuscripts from a monastery. The thief takes the trouble to sort the disordered papers into a patchwork narrative, whose main thread concerns Malpertuis, the house in an un-named coastal town to which young Jean-Jacques Grandsire is summoned by his dying uncle Cassave. The old man bequeaths a vast fortune to his several relatives, provided they all come to live permanently at the house. In the months that follow, Jean-Jacques is witness to weird and horrific events, and the reader discovers that no-one in the house is quite who they first appeared to be… It is a thickly-atmospheric tale that struck me—perhaps owing to its piecemeal composition—as having something of the quality of a stop-motion animation somehow set into prose: I enjoyed it very much.

In 1971, a movie-version of Malpertuis was released. It featured Orson Welles and Susan Hampshire, among others, and was directed by Harry Kümel (best-known, perhaps, for Le Rouge aux Lèvres, aka Daughters of Darkness, also released in 1971), who managed to put together Flemish, French and English-language versions of this ‘bizarre, lurid and baffling,’ film, which, I am sorry to say, I have not seen.