Patientia

I’ve written a couple of times here about the work of the 16th century Flemish miniaturist Joris (or George) Hoefnagel (1542-1601). One day a few months ago I did an abebooks search on his name, and noticed one Amsterdam-based bookseller was offering a volume which reproduced a suite of emblems by Hoefnagel entitled Patientia (Patience). I could find only the slightest references to this work on-line, and, at length, I decided to order the book and see it for myself.

It turns out that Hoefnagel’s emblem-book only ever existed in manuscript, or at least it did until the fac-simile edition (the book I had obtained) was issued in Antwerp in 1935. The manuscript included twenty-four drawings, each one accompanied by an eight-line verse in Flemish, French, or Spanish. While these drawings lack the polish of the miniatures for which Hoefnagel is renowned, they are interesting nevertheless, and, as they date from some years before he had even accepted his first artistic commission, they could be considered perhaps as apprentice-pieces.

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The manuscript’s title in full is: Traité de la Patience, Par Emblêmes Inventées et desinées par George Hoefnagel à Londres, L’an 1569. Hoefnagel had been in London on business for most of 1568 and ’69, during which time, we read, ‘he moved in the company of his peers, rich Dutch and Flemish merchants, such as Johannes Radermacher, who were in close contact with the English court and nobility.’ Evidently though, his business duties & social obligations permitted him plenty of time for sketching, painting and versification.

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The drawings themselves seem simply illustrative of the situations or morals in the verses, and there is little or no obtrusive symbolism. That said, merely not being able to decipher the verses can make puzzles of the drawings: I’ve no idea, for example, what is going on between the two men in the foreground of the second of the images above. As for the guard or sentry in the fourth image, my first thought was that he was badly in need of taking a piss, but, having partly-construed the Spanish in the accompanying verse, it seems he is cold, & is presumably just trying to warm his hand.

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The book from which I scanned these images is entitled Patientia, 24 Politieke Emblemata door Joris Hoefnagel, 1569, in fac simile…. It was edited by one Dr. Rob. Van Roosbroeck, and published by ‘de Seven Sinjoren.’ Click on the detail images above to see the drawings in full, and enlarged.

Music to Shake a Stick at

I’ve been passed that ‘musical baton’ questionnaire thingy that has been circulating recently (thanks, Phil!): here is my attempt at completing it… The total volume of music on my computer is 13.6Gb, which comprises 2,834 tracks from I-don’t-know-how-many albums. I’d guess that only about 5% of those tracks were downloaded, legitimately or otherwise, the remainder being ripped from my CDs.

The last CDs I bought were a pair classical discs on the Finnish Ondine label: one features three compositions by Einojuhani Rautavaara, including his new-ish Clarinet Concerto, while the other is a selection of works by John Corigliano. Those arrived in the mail yesterday, while the day before brought The Tain by The Decemberists, which completes my set of recordings by that admirable band.

The track playing right now, is the first movement of the Rautavaara Clarinet Concerto already mentioned. I’ve been lukewarm about some of this composer’s other recent concertos, so I’m not sure how I’ll like this one. As for five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me, well, here I will change the subject like a dissembling politico, and answer a question other than the one asked, as I had an old draft entry lying about concerning some of my favourite (vinyl) LPs, that I’ve harvested from the junk-shops and charity-stores in the town where I live: I’ll pick out a half dozen tracks from those:

1. Chopin’s Rondo à la Krakowiak, perfomed by the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, conducted by Willem van Otterloo, with Nikita Magaloff on piano, this is one of Chopin’s early works for orchestra & piano, composed when he was just nineteen, & appears on the LP in question as the side-B filler for a rather frenetic performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto. Magaloff plays the Krakowiak with passion (& a couple of bum notes) to richly bittersweet & poignant effect.

2. Shostakovitch’s Piano Concerto no. 2 as performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with Leonard Bernstein as both conductor and soloist. I’ve heard a few versions of this piece on CD, but none of them have quite the sparkle of this old rendition. I don’t know how Bernstein managed to conduct while playing like his life depended on it (with his eyebrows?), but anyhow, this is exhilarating music.

3. From the Sinatra at the Sands double live LP, which is all good, except perhaps for Frank’s twelve-minute mid-set monologue, the song I’ve Got You Under My Skin is one that stands out, wherein Sinatra’s voice & Count Basie’s band combine memorably to polish an old chestnut until it positively glows.

4. Out of the several fine tracks on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, I have a particular weakness for Visions of Johanna, which must be one of the most evocative of urban nocturnes.

5. My Dad bought a copy of The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams the year it came out, which was a bit of a departure from his usual musical diet of The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, & Creedence Clearwater Revival. I always liked it too, and while the title track and Love is a Stranger are both excellent, my favourite song on the LP is the layered, atmospheric The Walk.

6. And, lastly, from Prince’s Sign ☮’ The Times, the live track It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night is one that never fails to uplift & entertain me.

The five people to whom I’m passing the baton? Uhmmm, I think I must have dropped it somewhere, clumsy oaf that I am, and, as I’m heading back to the clubhouse-pavilion for a round of drinks, I’ll just leave it for anyone who cares enough to pick it up.

Bruegel: Seven Vices and a Virtue

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s publisher, the splendidly-named Hieronymus Cock, issued a series of prints based on drawings by the artist on the theme of the seven deadly sins, or vices, around 1556-7. Details from these follow below: click on them to see the images in full. As in my previous entry about Bruegel, these images were scanned from my copy of Bruegel and Lucas van Leyden: Complete Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, edited by Jacques Lavalleye, published by Abrams, ca. 1967.

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These compositions, crowded with grotesque and bizarre figures, clearly echo the work of that other Hieronymus, Mr. Bosch, aka Jeroen van Aken, ‘Maître de Bois-le-Duc,’ El Bosco. ‘It has been assumed that Bruegel’s chief reason for imitating Bosch in his graphic work was a commercial one: Bosch was simply more popular than Bruegel, and therefore engravings in the Bosch manner were more marketable than his own prints.’ Of course, Bruegel’s emulation of the elder artist’s style may have been as much an affectionate homage, as it was an opportunistic money-earner.

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While the symbolism of many of the inhabitants of these engravings is far from obvious, some of the iconography is straightforward enough. In the first of pair of images directly above, for example, which depicts Invidia (Envy), the woman at the focus of the image is gnawing at a heart, and pointing, one presumes covetously, at an enormous, plump turkey. And in Superbia (Pride), a ruffed and corseted lady standing next to a (proverbially proud) peacock admires her own reflection…

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In addition to these vices, I’ve also included an extra image, an odd-one-out, depicting a virtue: Patientia (Patience, the last image, below). This was executed at around the same time as the vices, and shares the same Bosch-inspired imagery. A few years later, Bruegel also produced a series of prints depicting the cardinal & theological virtues, but these, while perhaps more accomplished in execution, seem less interesting to my eye, not surprisingly perhaps, considering their necessarily strait-laced subject-matter.

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Incidentally, although the proverb tells us ‘patience is a virtue,’ it is, in the Catholic scheme of things at least, neither a Cardinal nor a Capital virtue, but rather one of the twelve ‘fruits of the holy spirit.’ These engravings can also be found on-line here, although the scans are even blurrier than mine.

Atalanta Fugiens

Michael Maier’s book Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta Fleeing) was published at Oppenheim in 1617 by the firm of Johann Theodor de Bry. It’s an alchemical text in a strikingly unusual form: it comprises fifty sections, where each section consists of a score of a short fugue (‘in two canonical parts over a cantus firmus’), a motto, an engraved emblematic image, a Latin verse, and a few pages of cryptic commentary. It takes its title from the legendary tale of Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes. In its simultaneous presentation of music, image, poetry and prose, it is a singular piece of Baroque multimedia. A few of the books’s emblems (engraved either by de Bry himself, or by his son-in-law, Matthäus Merian), follow below.

Atalanta Fugiens was just one of five books that Maier had published in 1617 alone. It seems reasonable to assume that these works had been taking shape over the previous few years, during which time Maier was in England. He had arrived at King James’s court near the end of 1611, apparently sent as an envoy of sorts, to work on behalf of those protestant German princes who were hoping to conclude the marriage of their figurehead, Frederik V., the elector Palatine, with the King’s daughter Elizabeth, a union that eventually took place in 1613. The Christmas greeting which Maier presented to James in 1611 bore an emblem (a rose and cross), some Latin verses, and a musical score…

According to Joscelyn Godwin’s essay ‘The Deepest Rosicrucian—Michael Maier,’ (printed in the book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited), Maier had been born in Kiel, on the Baltic coast, in 1569. His father ‘was an embroiderer in gold and pearls who worked for the nobility of Holstein, then under Danish rule.’ He attended University at Rostock, Padua, Frankfurt an der Oder and Basel. At Padua his skill with Latin verse won him the title of poet laureate. He earned a doctorate of philosophy at Frankfurt in 1592, and became a doctor of medicine at Basel in 1596, after which he returned to Kiel and began practising as a physician. He also published a few treatises on medical subjects around this time.

In the early years of his medical practice, Maier witnessed a remarkable cure, apparently effected by alchemical means, and resolved to master the spagyric art for himself. He undertook a survey of alchemical literature, and also made a more practical study of mineralogy, visiting nearby mining areas in so doing. From 1602 he practised alchemy, in a laboratory he had set up in Kiel with his sister’s husband. After several years’ experimentation, he claimed he ‘had obtained, by God’s grace, the Universal Medicine, of a bright lemon colour.’ Having this completed this magnum opus, Maier, his funds exhausted, sought sympathetic patronage, and turned to the court of the Emperor Rudolf II., in Prague.

Maier was in Prague for about a year until he was granted an audience with the reclusive Emperor, but, once they met, he soon won Rudolf’s confidence. Within a few weeks of that meeting, he was awarded the titles of Personal Physician to the Emperor, Count Palatine, and Knight Exemptus. Maier only had a couple of years in which to take advantage of his newly-elevated status, however, as Rudolf’s hold on his crown was already weakening: in 1611, he was forced to abdicate. Maier, in need of a new patron, wrote to a number of German princes, and, shortly thereafter, found himself en route to London.

In her book Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems, (my source, also, for the images reproduced here), H.M.E. de Jong traces the origins of many of the book’s mottoes and images, and shows its extensive reliance on previous works, and its place embedded in a tradition that has since faded to near-invisibility. The first emblem in the book, for instance, which is also the first of the images reproduced here, draws on a text that was perceived as one of the oldest and most authoritative alchemical pronouncements, the so-called Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Tablet), whose authorship was attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus.

The image of the Ouroboros, the dragon devouring its own tail, shown in the third of the present images, was also employed in ancient alchemical texts, as a symbol of universal unity. Maier associates a more specific meaning with it, that it represents the ‘Unity of Matter and the Subject of the Wise; or more precisely the Mercury of the Wise.’ This, and the fifth of the present images (the King in the steam-bath) are also found in another notable alchemical emblem-book, that of Lambsprinck. Maier’s work was influenced by Lambsprinck’s text, and the illustrated edition of that text issued in 1625, was, one supposes, influenced in turn by the iconography in Atalanta Fugiens.

Not all of Maier‘s images are borrowed. The emblem immediately above, for example, appears to have been Maier’s own invention: de Jong, at least, was unable to find antecedents for it in the alchemical literature. The accompanying motto reads ‘May Nature, Reason, Exercise and Literature be the guide, staff, spectacles and lamp for him who participates in chemistry.’ Nature here is portrayed as the woman bearing fruit & flowers, and Reason is the pilgrim’s staff, Experience his spectacles, and Literature his light. Frankly, it is a relief to find symbolism so straightworward, amid all this esoterica.

In his book The Golden Game Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola writes that ‘there are many fascinating and scholarly works dealing with the critical and historical problems of alchemy; but it is unfortunate that most of them betray their authors’ incapacity to interpret correctly the veiled language of the Wise’ This is an incapacity that I must admit I share: I have read several books touching on alchemy, and I still find it all barely comprehensible. I suppose I am unable (and unwilling) to unlearn the basics of modern chemistry that my education provided me with. The drawback of this is that I’ll most likely always have my nose pressed against the glass, so to speak, when looking in upon imagery like this.

Boullée

I’m obliged to a commenter (thanks, Antoni!) for drawing my attention to the works by Étienne-Louis Boullée and Jean-Jacques Lequeu that can be found at the Bibliothèque National de France’s Gallica web-site. Both men were visionary architects who imagined and planned grandiose buildings that would never be constructed (it was a follow-up search regarding ‘visionary architecture,’ by the way, that led me to discover the work of A.G. Rizzoli). I’ve gently lifted a few of Boullée’s designs from the Gallica site: these follow below—click on the images to see them enlarged:

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Many of Boullée’s designs are monumental visions of neoclassical grandeur that often cross over into outright bombast. The following design, for a cenotaph in honour of Isaac Newton, is particularly striking: a greatly-magnified version of the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, but built around an enormous spherical planetarium…

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The following designs are for another projected cenotaph, this one a truncated cone atop a pair of concentric circular platforms, ringed around with funerary cypresses. If that weren’t monumental enough, Boullée envisaged this structure as just the centrepiece of a much larger whole.

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For more about Boullée’s life & work, the on-line exhibition at the Bibliothèque National de France looks like the best resource (although it’s in French only). In a profile of the architect at the Getty Museum’s site, we read that he ‘inspired generations of draftsmen, visionaries, and builders:’ an influence that, it seems, persists to the present day.

Michelangelo’s Dream

Maria Ruvoldt’s book The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep and Dreams is an absorbing study of ‘the Renaissance perception, production and reception of sleep and dreams and their relation to divine inspiration.’ In Chapter 6 of the book, Ruvoldt looks in detail at a fascinating drawing by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Sogno (the Dream):

The drawing, done in graphite on paper, was made around 1533. It is currently in the collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Ruvoldt speculates that it was among a number of pieces that Michelangelo presented as gifts to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young man with whom the artist had recently become infatuated. The drawing has been interpreted (by Panovsky, among others) as an allegory for virtue triumphing over vice in an ‘awakening of the soul.’

The semicircular arrangement of figures sketched around the reclining nude and the descending angel depict several of the vices, but are by no means a typical catalogue of the ‘seven deadly sins:’ there is no depiction of Superbia (Pride), for example, while Luxuria (Lust) is sketched more than once. Ruvoldt plausibly suggests that Michelangelo drew those aspects of the vices which he felt applied to himself…

Beneath the recumbent nude are a number of masks. The mask given most prominence, the one with the flat nose and the forked beard, is a slightly caricatured likeness of the artist himself. This could be seen as a physical representation being shown as subordinate to the artist’s spiritual likeness as embodied by the reclining figure.

Perhaps the most puzzling element in the composition is the sphere upon which the central figure leans back. The meridian encircling this globe has led to conjecture that it represents the world. Ruvoldt thinks it is intended instead as a symbol and an attribute of melancholy: more specifically that saturnine melancholy, which, according to Marsilio Ficino, was a characteristic temperament of men of genius, rendering them susceptible to intense depression and inspiration alike: it is known that Michelangelo considered himself a melancholic of this stamp. Spheres also feature in other contemporary depictions of melancholy.

According to Ruvoldt, the fact that the angel’s trumpet is pointing at the other figure’s forehead, and not to his ear, is also significant. Apparently, Renaissance medical tradition held that the forehead corresponded to the location of the mind’s imaginative faculty, to that part of the brain which receives and preocesses visual impressions: in which case, what we see here is a depiction of the artist directly inspired by images received ‘from above.’