A.G. Rizzoli

In 1990, a young woman brought some peculiar architectural drawings she had found several years earlier to San Francisco gallery-owner and collector Bonnie Grossman with a view to selling them. The drawings were highly elaborate, but the buildings they depicted were imaginary. They were signed, but the artist’s name was altogether unknown. Grossman was fascinated: she bought the drawings, and, after doing a little detective-work, tracked down a much larger collection of works by the same artist, one A.G. Rizzoli, which she found in his great-nephew’s garage.

Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) was the fourth of five children born into a poor, immigrant family. His parents were recent arrivals to California from Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of southern Switzerland. Between 1912 and 1915 Rizzoli studied engineering at a polytechnic college in Oakland, where he formed a particular interest in architecture. These were difficult years for the Rizzoli family: one of his (unmarried) sisters became pregnant, left the family home, was married, but then divorced; his oldest brother left the family home permanently, never to be seen again, and, in the Spring of 1915, his father disappeared, having stolen a gun from his employer.

Achilles was an eccentric. In the early ’20s he filed at least two lawsuits on flimsy pretexts concerning perceived injustices he felt had been done to his family. He worked at a variety of low-paying jobs. From about 1927, he began composing short stories and novellas about a group of utopian architects: these literary endeavours culminated in a novel entitled The Colonnade, which Rizzoli had published at his own expense in 1933, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Metermaid.’ Alas, Rizzoli’s prose, we read, was ‘verbose, stiff and boring,’ and his book found no readers. By 1933, Rizzoli was living alone with his mother: he never married, and was a lifelong celibate.

It was only in 1935 that Rizzoli began illustrating his utopian visions. Over the next decade he ‘produced a body of spectacular architectural renderings, in grand Beaux-Arts style.’ These were done in coloured ink on rag paper, and followed an inscrutably elaborate plan for a notional locale Rizzoli termed YTTE, an acronym for the phrase ‘Yield To Total Elation.’ In many cases, the drawings were also intended as ‘symbolic portrayals’ of family-members, neighbours, or acqauintances. In 1936, Rizzoli began work as a draughtsman at the offices of a local firm of architects. Later that year came news that his father’s remains had been found at an isolated spot in Marin County: an apparent suicide. Also in 1936, his beloved mother’s health began to deteriorate— she died the following year.

Rizzoli stayed on in the house he had shared with his mother, where he lived out an austere, friendless life. On a number of occasions in the late ’30s he staged home-made exhibitions of his work, which only a few of his neighbours and colleagues ever came to see. After 1944, Rizzoli began work on a new project, little of which, alas, is known to have survived: ‘an illustrated prose narrative that included sketches for new architectural transfigurations…’ From around this time, he reported experiencing increasing numbers of mystical-religious visions: ‘pageantry in which action and drama and melodies and imagery…are…very much of the substance of air…[and] well nigh as essential.’

Rizzoli’s final artistic project commenced in 1958: an on-going record of his visions which combined verse, prose and architectural sketches. This work eventually filled over three hundred 24" x 36" vellum sheets: Rizzoli entitled it the A.C.E., which stood for AMTE’s Celestial Extravaganza. AMTE, in turn, stood for ‘Architecture Made To Entertain,’ which, in Rizzoli’s worldview, was both an underlying architectural principle, and its sacred, virginal, female personification. Rizzoli continued work on the A.C.E. until he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1977.

Click on the details above to see the images in full: the scans are not the best—a little blurred here and there. The images, and the information I have quoted and paraphrased above are all taken from a marvellous book A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions, published by Abrams in 1997, in association with the San Diego Museum of Art. Here are a few more related links.

Bruegel’s Proverbs

I had wondered about the origin and meaning of the first of the images below since I first saw it a little more than a year ago in Johann Theodor de Bry’s 1627 emblem-book Proscenium vitæ humanæ. I posted de Bry’s version of it here. The same image, I discovered, had also appeared in de Bry’s earlier (1611) volume Emblemata Sæcularia. I had read that de Bry had borrowed several of his images from engravings of works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but it wasn’t until I saw a version of this engraving among a series of Bruegel’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ in the emblem-compilation Théâtre d’Amour, that I understood that this was one of them.

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It turns out then, that the image that had intrigued me was a simple, but witty illustration of a proverb to the effect of ‘there is always a way to a rich man’s money.’ This, and the other engravings shown here were published as a set by one Jan Wierix, in 1568 or ’69, but are based on designs made by Bruegel some ten years earlier, at the same time he was making a painting on the same subject. The second image, above, illustrates another barbed maxim on the subject of wealth: ‘the music of a rich man is always pleasant, even when he plays on a jawbone.’

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We read that Bruegel did not, in general, execute engravings such as these himself, but rather:

Bruegel made the drawings, which the engravers reproduced on copper […] which the printsellers edited and distributed. Now, despite the number of interpreters and the variety of the work, one is struck by the close relationship that exists among the prints originating from Bruegel’s pen or pencil. From this one must conclude that the preparatory drawings were extremely detailed [and] were easily transposable, stroke for stroke, onto metal. In his composition Bruegel foresees the effects to be achieved in the engraving and leaves no freedom to the engravers, whose job is to reproduce rather than interpret his work.

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The images and the quotation above I have taken from a book by Jacques Lavalleye, entitled Bruegel and Lucas van Leyden: Complete Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, published by Abrams ca. 1967. Click on the images to see them enlarged.

De’ Grassi’s Alphabet

As a follow-up to my entry on ‘figurative alphabets,’ I’ve since obtained a copy of a book (Omaggio all’Alfabeto, by Attilio Rossi, Milan, 1990), which contains a complete set of reproductions of the painted alphabet of Giovannino de’ Grassi (d. 1398). The detail images below link to some large JPEGS scanned from this volume, which, between them, spell out twenty-four stylised letters: there being no j, and an single letter that’s both u and v.

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This alphabet occupies a few of the pages in a sketchbook (taccuino) of de’ Grassi’s, which has been in the possession of the Angelo Mai library in Bergamo since about 1845. The codex was restored in 1997, and a facsimile edition of it was published soon afterwards. The present images, alas, pre-date the restoration work, and are decidedly murky in places.

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I’ve only been able to find a few other images from de’ Grassi’s book, besides those in the links above. There are a few more on this Italian page about ‘The International Gothic’ style, and one more b&w image on this page about Valentina Visconti and Isabella of Bavaria.

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Page by Page

Some of the books I’ve read over the past six months: a back-to-back double Nobel-winners’ combo of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertesz; about three quarters of Jean Améry’s On Aging: Revolt and Resignation;; Javier Marías’s All Souls and Dark Back of Time; Jean Ray’s Malpertuis, Julian Cope’s The Megalithic European and Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classen, David Honer and Anthony Synott. I ordered new copies of Calvino’s Invisible Cities and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller with the intention of re-reading them, but haven’t got around to that yet. I did, however, read a couple of books recently which had a decidedly Calvino-like feel to them…

The Atlantis of the present day faces many challenges: environmental degredation, ethnic conflict, and economic disparity resulting from decades of isolationism. Situated as it is between Europe and North America, Atlantis has long been regarded as a “sinking island,” in the words of one of its foremost novelists, Adam e’Aea, “not entirely real, even to its inhabitants.” The Atlantean identity, then, is caught in this shifting zone, flooded by foreign values and investment, a world in ellipsis, neither quite post-colony nor cultural centre. It has become the task of the Atlantean novelist to explore this rich, perplexing and emerging interspace.

The outsider’s view of the island has long been shaped by the work of the British poet and novelist Rupert Brooke (1887-1960), especially his Atlantis Quartet (1919-27), which emphasized the mysterious, antediluvian nature of the modern island, a world which, like Brooke himself, barely survived the devastation of the First World War… pp 46-7.

Having read and quite liked Thomas Wharton’s novel Salamander, my curiosity was prodded by Scribblingwoman’s mention of the same author’s more recent work The Logogryph, enticingly subtitled ‘a bibliography of imaginary books.’ I ordered a copy from the Gaspereau Press, and was delighted when a beautifully-printed and bound volume arrived a week or two later. It’s an enjoyable, decidedly librocentric compilation of fable and memoir, affectionately indebted to Borges and Calvino. I particularly enjoyed the account of the literature of Atlantis, as quoted above. Wharton goes on to describe a work by the putative Atlantean novelist e’Aea: a fantastic account of an imagined world in which Atlantis sank beneath the waves millennia ago, but surviving, adapting to underwater life ‘oblivious to and concealed from European civilization and its later manifestations on the American continent.’

A man with an insatiable appetite for dreams dreamed so much that in the building where he lived no one else was able to dream, except perhaps when the dreamer went to the sea or the mountains on vacation. An irritating and impossible situation, and the building’s tenants, all of them people of fine background—professors, dukes, proprietors of construction companies, and an international hit man—made their objections heard. The gentleman’s response was not well-mannered, and the question began to rankle. No one in the building dreamed anymore, and—because that gentleman dreamed entirely in full color, and undertook experiments in three- dimensionality—even the people in the neighboring condominiums dreamed little, and in small format, and in black and white. The dispute ended up in court, where it was determined that the gentleman was involved in illegal use of the dreams of others, and had to put an end to it, since he was falling short of the norms of good-neighborly behavior. But of course it is not easy to persuade someone to restore possession of dreams, or not to appropriate dreams which do not belong to him. The gentleman continued to dream all the dreams in the building, and only the international hit man managed, every now and then, to dream a small, stupid dream p. 201, translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.

Giorgio Manganelli’s Centuria was one of a few titles I’d read about at the Complete Review that I decided to check out for myself. At first, I struggled with this book, which comprises one hundred miniature ‘novels,’ each one originally typed on a single large-format sheet of paper. I found it flat. It wasn’t until I was about a third of the way into the book that I suppose I must have become accustomed to its distinctive rhythm, and began to get into it. By the end, I was entirely converted, and loved it. The way the individual ‘novels’ echo and reflect one another was, to me, faintly but fascinatingly reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The book I’m reading now is another Complete Review recommendation: Arno Schmidt’s The School for Atheists, an utterly bizarre, but also beguiling ‘Novella-Comedy in 6 Acts:’

(Tellingstedt. Kolderup House. / Night, around 2 o’clock; (and thus at the foot of 7 October 2014). / William T. Kolderup, dressed in perfectly correct gray, moves slo’ly, on his cane, along the corridors drably beglimmered by half=burned-out bulbs: cold loin garnisht with scrolls of gout-knotted hand; above the aged crouped brow the dustgray hair; (and for a deep breath you’d do well to hold onto a cupboard!) bending, putting=on pants let alone shoes, becomes a ›chore‹ : it is neither easy nor pretty, careering from stammering lad to stumpering codger. - (?) He, however, was only 40 : when one can still betake oneself from immobility to silence on one’s own 2 feet; : ’nd so farther across the pallid floor, (his shado fretfully joins in behind him once again). ? /Latching open the windo; . ? . : (Monolunates must ’parently take a, creaking=neckt, look now & then to see what the stars are up=to) - : - : the moon a face round holey walls. Orion, too, pretty much in the south. West and north oversnared by star-nets : the dainty hypermadness of the Univoid. - ? : m=m; it'd already gone down; (once spoke 2=3 times with a grandson of FLAMMARION; who had still kno’n the old man !) p. 11, translated from the German by John E. Woods.

And besides all those, I’ve bought a few books which I have only lightly skimmed through, considering them more as references than ready reading: Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, for example, and Mario Praz’s Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery,, and A Vision of a Living World, the third volume in Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order series, of which I now have the complete set. And beyond those are the picture-books: Théâtre d’Amour; the István Orosz catalogue which I bought twice by mistake; the Mitelli book I’ve been scanning the guts out of, and a couple of other Italian art-books, of which, perhaps, more anon. And, of course, there is Curiosities of Literature, which I am reading as carefully as I have ever read anything, as I scan, OCR, and manually HTMLify it page by page…

Théâtre d’Amour

The estimable Taschen Books have recently published a volume entitled Théâtre d’Amour, which reproduces a collection of coloured love-emblems and other prints compiled by an unknown hand some time around 1620. The book includes several series of engravings on various more-or-less amatory themes, including ‘The Trades of Cupid, The Seven Deadly Sins, The Seven Virtues, The Muses, The Loves of the Gods, and The Five Senses.’ The first and longest series in the book, however, comprises the twenty-four images from Daniël Heinsius’s Quæris Quid Sit Amor? (‘You Want to Know What Love Is?’), which was, when it was published in Amsterdam in 1601, the first emblem-book solely devoted to the vexed subject of love.

Quæris Quid Sit Amor?, also known as Emblemata Amatoria, gave birth to a distinct sub-genre of its own, and in the years that followed numerous other books of love-emblems appeared in the Netherlands (notably Otto Vænius’s 1608 Amorum Emblemata, and Jacob Cats’s 1618 Sinne- en minnebeelden), and elsewhere in Europe. A new edition of the book was published in 1608, and, in 1616, its emblems were incorporated into Heinsius’s Nederduytsche poemata. In the preface to this latter work ‘it becomes clear that Heinsius [1580-1655] was not the only author of the love emblems [and] was in fact presenting the work of a group of (unidentified) Leiden humanists who wrote the subscriptions of the emblems in cooperation.’ The book’s engravings were the work of one Jacques de Gheyn (1565-1629).

The book was scarcely less derivative, however, than it was influential, and in many cases Heinsius and his friends, the poets, and de Gheyn, the artist, were recycling imagery from earlier works. Mario Praz, in his Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, devotes a chapter to tracing some of the origins of these emblems. The first and fourth of the present images, for example, have antecedents in Maurice Scève’s Délie, a volume of love-poetry published in Lyons in 1544, illustrated with fifty allegorical woodcuts. The conceits in Scève’s poetry owed a great deal to Petrarch, writes Praz, and more remotely, by way of the Mediæval Latin poets, and Provençal troubadors, to Ovid.

The fifth of the images I’ve re-presented here is drawn instead from the original book of emblems, Alciato’s, wherein it is used as an illustration of friendship, rather than love. Returning to the Taschen edition, Carsten-Peter Warncke, the book’s editor, explains in his essay The Garden of Love and its Delights, that in that compilation, Heinsius’s compositions have been replaced by ‘by anonymous French verses which are not translations but commentaries in their own right.’

This was characteristic, Prof. Dr. Warncke continues, of publishing of the day, when book production was dominated by reprints, revised editions and compilations from earlier manuscripts given a new interpretation—by no means always authorized. This type of intellectual exchange, practised across national and linguistic boundaries, finds one of its finest expressions in the emblem literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its products also demonstrate a concept of wit and intellect quite different to the modern belief that originality lies in what has never been seen or known before. Holding sway in those days, by contrast, was the ideal of the “ingenious invention,” the extraction of something new from what was familiar and established, and which consequently already held authority.

Click on the images above to see them enlarged… By way of an afterthought: Cupids, putti, ‘loves;’ those arrow-happy mites once buzzed through the air of Baroque Europe like so many flies—but since child labour has been outlawed, and pubic health initiatives have driven vermin ever further out of view, how few are stung by Cupds in these, our enlightened times?

Psalmanazar

Isaac D’Israeli, in his article on Literary Impostures, mentions the intriguing story of George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763), a man of uncertain origins who came to claim that he was a native of the island of Formosa (i.e. Taiwan). So little was known about this island in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, that Psalmanazar got away with an elaborately fanciful back-story, one which he eventually expanded into a marvellously inventive book-length Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, which was published in London in 1704.

Psalmanazar’s quick wit, ready imagination and sound memory convinced many of his story, and sufficed to wrong-foot those who suspected his imposture. When summoned to the Royal Society, he was asked by Edmund Halley whether the sun ever shone all the way down the chimneys in Formosa. Psalmanazar hazarded that it did not, at which Halley explained that, Formosa lying between the tropics, it must. Psalmanazar riposted that Formosan chimneys twist and turn on their way down, so the sunlight never reaches the bottom… Eventually, after 1706, the fake Formosan admitted that he had been living a lie. He spent most of the rest of his life as a jobbing writer and editor in London. In his later years he wrote a memoir of his imposture, which was published posthumously.

There are several good articles about Psalmanazar to be found on-line, a few of which feature illustrations from his Historical and Geographical Description, which I have reproduced here. Best of all, a few extracts from the book have been posted at this site. Here, for example, Psalmanazar on the diet of Formosans:

…they are permitted to eat of Swine’s Flesh, of all sorts of Fowl, except Pigeons and Turtles; of all sorts of Venison, except the Hart and the Doe, of all the Fish that swims in the Sea or the Rivers without any exception. They some times roast or boil their Flesh, but they know not what it is to stew any Meat, and therefore do not use it, though it is not forbidden. They commonly eat the Flesh of Venison and of Fowls raw: And, which may seem strange here in England, they eat Serpents also, which they look upon as very good Meat and very savoury…

Of the animals in Formosa, he wrote:

Besides the Animals abovementioned, they have also familiar Serpents, which they carry about their Body; and Toads which they keep in their Houses to attract all the Venom that may happen to be there; and Weasels for eating of Mice, and Tortoises for their Gardens. There is also a kind of Animal much like a Lizzard, but not so big, which the Natives call Varchiero, i.e. the Persecutor of Flies; its Skin is smooth and clear like Glass, and appears in various colours according to the situation of its Body: ’Tis wonderful to see how eagerly and industriously it pursues the Flies wheresoever it sees them, upon a Table, or on Flesh, or in Drink, and it seldom fails of catching them.

And of the language of the Formosans:

The Emperor is call’d in that Language, Baghathaan Cheveraal, i.e. the most high Monarch; the King, Bagalo, or Angon: the Vice-Roy, Bagalendro, or Bagalender; the Nobles, Tanos; the Governours of Cities or Isles, os Tanos Soulletos; the Citizens, Poulinos; the Countrymen, Barhaw; the Soldiers, Plessios; a Man, Banajo; a Woman, Bajane; a Son, Bot; a Daughter, Boti; a Father, Pornio; a Mother, Porniin; a Brother, Geovreo; a Sister, Javraijn; Kinsmen, Arvauros; an Isle, Avia; a City, Tillo; a Village, Casseo; the Heaven, Orhnio; the Earth, Badi; the Sea, Anso; Water, Ouillo.

Click on the images above to see them slightly enlarged.