På Semester

As of today jag är på semester (I am on vacation) for two weeks, so there’ll be nothing new here for a while, except for the posts I’ve scheduled to appear over at Curiosities of Literature. If you’re here in the meantime, please don’t mind the spam, & by all means have a look around & make yourself at home in the archives.

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Raimondi

Further to this recent entry, there follow a few more images scanned from my copy of The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, by Innis Shoemaker and Elizabeth Broun. The following are details: click on them to see the images enlarged and in full.

The first two images share a curious device: a serpent with a human face. In Adam and Eve, below, this clearly represents the voice of temptation. Although the meaning of Serpent Speaking to a Young Man, (above) is much less clear, it is tempting to suppose that temptation is depicted here too. The second, later engraving shows some refinements in Raimondi’s style, and is certainly a more cohesive composition than the earlier work. The division in Adam and Eve between a richly-detailed foreground and a more lightly-sketched background, apparently betrays the influence of Lucas van Leyden.

The engraving below, Two Women with the Signs of Libra and Scorpio, probably derives, like many of Raimondi’s later prints, from a design by Raphael. At some point ca. 1511, Raimondi entered into a partnership with Raphael, as the majority of his prints after that time follow designs or paintings from Raphael’s workshop. Raimondi thereby became the first successful reproductive fine-art engraver, founding a tradition that would last until the advent of photography. By subordinating his work to Raphael’s, however, Raimondi helped cement the reputation of engraving as a secondary and a dependent art.

By 1515, Raimondi was successful and busy enough to take on two assistants of his own: Marco Dente da Ravenna, and Agostino Veneziano. The engraving below, Venus Wounded by a Rose’s Thorn, is the work of Dente. Again, a design of Raphael’s is thought to have provided its inspiration. After Raphael’s death in 1520, Raimondi continued a similar working relationship with Giulio Romano, the older painter’s favourite protégé.

Around 1524, Raimondi executed a series of sixteen erotic engravings following designs by Romano, which were circulated as I Modi, (‘the ways,’ i.e. the positions) accompanied by sixteen lewd sonnets by Pietro Aretino. The Papal authorities were displeased: and while Romano managed to leave Rome, and Aretino narrowly avoided a jail sentence, Raimondi went to prison for a couple of years. Not long after his release, there was further misfortune for the engraver in 1527, when his studio was looted during the Sack of Rome. His movements after that time are uncertain, and it is not known if any of his engravings post-date that disaster: some accounts say that he was reduced to poverty, and was obliged to return to his native Bologna, where he died ca. 1534.

The Empire of Vegetables

I am very grateful to Mr. Rusher for sending me a delightful book: Romeo Salta’s Le Delizie della mia Cucina. Salta arrived in New York an illegal immigrant in 1929, thereafter working his way up to become a chef, and, in time, a renowned restauranteur. He died in 1998, aged 93. Le Delizie… is the Italian version of a recipe book he originally published in English as The Pleasures of Italian Cooking. The recipes look excellent, and the book will be a useful complement to my copy of Anna del Conte’s The Gastronomy of Italy, but what drew Mr. Rusher’s attention to the book in the first place were not its recipes, but its quaint illustrations…

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These depict anthropomorphosised vegetables in a variety of situations. Looking closer at the illustrations, I saw the names Varin and de Gonet on each of them. Amédée Varin, I discovered, was their artist, and Gabriel de Gonet had been their publisher. They had originally appeared in a book entitled L’Empire des Légumes, (The Empire of Vegetables) sometime, I would guess, in the 1850s or ’60s. Varin evidently illustrated at least one other book for de Gonet. I could find little information about Varin on-line, beyond that he sometimes worked with an Eugéne Varin, I guess, perhaps, his brother, and that his style is seen as reminiscent of Grandville’s.

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Staying with the vegetabley theme, here is Salta’s recipe for Carciofi alla Romana (Artichokes, Roman style): first, obtain six small, very tender artichokes; discard their outer leaves and trim the tips of the others. Open out their centres, taking care to keep them intact, and extract the hairy ‘chokes,’ which are barbe (beards) in Italian. Place the artichokes in cold water and lemon juice, to avoid discolouration. Re-fill the artichoke centres, using a mixture of a quarter cup of olive oil, two handfuls of finely-chopped parsley, 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped, and a few pinches of fresh mentuccia, or of dried mint, a teaspoon of salt, & pepper.

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Stand the artichokes close to one another in a saucepan, drizzle them with more olive oil, and cook them on a medium heat for 10 minutes (presumably having added water to the pan—the recipe doesn’t say how much, but this variant suggests just covering them with water) Then, add 2 glasses of white wine, and half a cup of chicken broth to the pan, with more salt & pepper. Cover, and cook on a medium heat for about 45 minutes, or, until the artichokes become tender. A vegetable stock could, of course, be substituted to make the dish suitable for vegetarians.

Click on the images above, by the way, to see the illustrations enlarged, and in full.

Lucas van Leyden

In the first decades of the 16th Century (According to Jacques Lavalleye), the art of engraving was dominated by three artistic personalities: Albrecht Dürer’s, Marcantonio Raimondi’s, and Lucas van Leyden’s. Of the three, van Leyden’s prints were perhaps the least influential, and his working life was the shortest, but his engravings were greatly esteemed by his contemporaries, and Vasari wrote ‘Albert [Dürer], on returning to Flanders, found another rival who had begun to make many delicate engravings. This was Lucas of Holland, who, although unequal to Albert in design, was his peer with the burin.’

Lucas Hugensz (or Jacobsz) was born in Leiden in 1494 (or 1489). His father had been a painter (none of whose works are known to have survived), and Lucas would presumably have studied with him, before he continued his training with another local painter, Cornelius Engelbrechtsz. His earliest dated engraving is from 1508, and his first survivng painting from 1511. He entered the Leiden painters’ guild in 1514. Lucas married in 1517: his marriage was childless, but it is thought he may have fathered an illegitimate daughter. He travelled a certain amount within Holland and Flanders, but is not known to have ventured any further.

‘Master Lukas, who engraves in copper, asked me as his guest. He is a little man, born at Leyden in Holland; he was at Antwerp. I have drawn with the metal-point the portrait of Master Lukas…’ So wrote Dürer in the notebooks he kept during his travels through Flanders in 1521. While Dürer’s prints were a formative influence on his graphic work, van Leyden also absorbed Italian influences through his acquaintance with Jan Gossaert, and by studying Raimondi’s prints. Lucas was also a notable and a successful painter, but his skill with paint & canvas was generally perceived as less exceptional than his way with copper & ink.

The majority of Lucas’s engravings were on religious subjects, but he also produced numerous ‘genre’ prints, such as those in the two pairs of details immediately above and below. According to Lavalleye, in his book Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Lucas van Leyden: The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, the engraving above, traditionally entitled ‘Old Woman With a Bunch of Grapes,’ (but which could equally well be an ‘Old Man With a Bunch of Grapes’), shows the beginnings of an increased emphasis on caricature in van Leyden’s work, perhaps influenced by the contemporary successes of Quentin Massys.

One of Lucas’s most elaborate engravings on a secular theme is his ‘Virgil Suspended in a Basket’ (below—also here). In this composition, the ostensible subject is relegated to the background, the foreground being occupied by an richly-detailed group of figures, most of whom seem altogether unconcerned with the dangling poet’s plight. According to this page, this image exemplifies Lucas’s style of engraving as ‘characterized by long, flowing, gently curved strokes that impart grace to his draped figures, emphasize gesture, and unify the image.’

Lucas’s health began to fail him in the late 1520s, and his last known engravings date from 1530. He died in his home town in 1533. Lavalleye writes that van Leyden remained something of a singular, isolated figure, who, although widely copied, had no real artistic disciples or descendents. Nevertheless, he was the first Dutch artist to gain a truly international reputation. The present images are all details of scans from my copy of Lavalleye’s book, as mentioned above: click on them to see the images in full.

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The Bright Red House on Craggy Island

In one of the harbours in the town where I live is a very small island, hardly more than a dome of bare rock. It’s properly called Stakholmen, but I always think of it as ‘Craggy Island.’ A footbridge connects it to the shore, so that one may walk over to it, admire the none-too-impressive remnants of the foundations where once stood some 18th-Century fortifications, and satisfy oneself that there’s nothing more to it than that, before walking back shorewards again.

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About a month or so ago, however, there suddenly appeared a bright red house on Craggy Island: a scarlet house, a Monopoly-Hotel-red house. At first I guessed that it might be some kind of tourist-information station, but, a couple of weeks ago I happened to see a short article about it in a local free-sheet which explained that it was, in fact, a work of art…

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On Sunday morning I finally got around to taking a closer look. I had thought perhaps it was a plastic or metal mock-up, but no, it’s a proper, full-scale wooden house, in traditional Swedish holiday-cottage style, just a brighter shade than the usual red. What’s more, peering through the windows I could see red-painted walls, red-painted floorboards, and even a red-painted kitchen and bathroom. The door was locked, alas, so I was unable to take a look around inside.

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The house is a multimedia installation entitled Fårjaglov, (‘Shallwedance’) by a Malmö-based artist called Peter Johansson. Apparently, on approaching the house, one is supposed to hear the strains of ABBA’s music emanating from within, intended, I think, as a sarcastic comment on a certain conformist ‘prefabricated’ sense of Swedishness: on Sunday morning, however, it was silent.

The Dream of Raphael

The engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi known as The Dream of Raphael (below) is thought to date from some time between 1507 and 1510. Raimondi (1480-1527/34) was from Bologna, and, it seems, spent a few years in Venice (from about 1506) before settling in Rome (by 1510). The engraving’s title is a misnomer, courtesy of an 18th-Century art-historian: while Raimondi collaborated with Raphael to produce numerous engraved versions of the latter’s drawings and paintings, it is unlikely that the two men worked together until 1513.

The image is a complex and a puzzling one: a perfect invitation for erudite speculation. In the upper left is a distant cityscape’s waterfront. Lightning flashes from the sky, and the buildings in the upper right are in flames: over and around them tiny figures scramble to escape, or rush to the rescue. In the foreground two female nudes recline, sleeping, their bodies facing one another, almost mirror-images, and their faces tilted skyward. On the shoreline at their feet, there is a quartet of chimerical monsters.

Raimondi had achieved some of his first successes by producing copies of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, complete with the German artist’s monogram, apparently provoking Dürer to complain of plagiarism to the Venetian senate. In thir book on Raimondi, Innis Shoemaker and Elisabeth Broun claim that The Dream of Raphael copies a painting of Giorgione’s, now lost, which also supposedly inspired Battista Dossi’s 1544 canvas Il Sogno (‘The Dream’). It’s a tempting supposition, given the image’s apparent similarity of tone with Giorgione’s renowned painting La Tempesta (‘The Storm’).

In her book The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration, (previously mentioned here), Maria Ruvoldt credits Raimondi with the composition, but nevertheless notes some clear points of reference to other artists’ work. A couple of the small figures around the burning buildings apparently quote Michelangelo’s cartoon The Battle of Cascina. The weird beasties in the foreground are decidedly Bosch-like. And, even though the composition as a whole may not be Giorgione’s, the female nudes are certainly Giorgionesque, although it has been suggested that the Venetian painter’s influence may have been mediated via the engravings of Giulio Campagnola: note especially his Reclining Venus.

It is altogether unclear who or what the two nudes are meant to represent. In one theory, the image depicts a classical fable in which ‘two maidens were sleeping side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium […] the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in peaceful sleep.’ Another hazards that the scene is the ‘Dream of Hecuba,’ in which ‘the mother of Paris, who, shortly before his birth, dreamed that she gave birth to a torch that set the city of Troy in flames,’ where ‘The second woman in the engraving […] would be Hecuba seeing herself as she had the dream.’ In a third, the nudes personify ‘sacred and profane love…’

Click on the first of the images above to see an enlarged version of the whole print, which I scanned from Shoemaker & Broun’s The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi. The remaining images are all detail views cut from the first one & resized.

Two Parcels

I order a good many books, CDs and sundry other items on-line, so it’s not uncommon that I’ll come home to find a parcel waiting for me, or else a slip of paper which I must take to the nearest post-office counter to exchange for a parcel: which, in our case, is located in the Hemköp supermarket a few minutes’ walk away from the apartment. Last week I was lucky enough to receive two parcels other than the usual gifts to myself…

Ruud Pols, a Dutch artist, sent me a copy of a newly-published book of his drawings, entitled Liggende figuren (Reclining figures), published to coincide with an exhibition of his work at the Hein Elferink Gallery in the Dutch village of Staphorst. Ruud had been in touch with me via e-mail before (and was responsible for introducing me to the work of Saul Steinberg.) I was flattered when he wrote that he had found this Giornale a source of inspiration for his work. I’ve reproduced three images from the book here: click on them to see them much enlarged.

At first glance, the rich charcoal black in these images vaguely reminded me of Redon’s Noirs, but with an added sense of pervasive menace: these figures are only reclining because there is no way they can get up. Pols himself writes: ‘Looking over my shoulder in my bookshelf I notice that it’s especially the photographers’ world that inspires me: Eugene Richards, Sally Mann, Lucinda Devlin. Like Diane Arbus once said to her painter/friend: “You invent, where I discover.” It’s reminiscent of the way I look towards my drawings and why I love photography.’

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The second gift-book arrived the next day from Brazil, courtesy of fellow weblogger Bibi. After participating in a couple of the Giornale’s giveaways, she had kindly offered to send something of Brazil to what I imagine to be its cultural antipode here in Scandinavia. I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind some kind of cook-book, and Bibi came up with the goods in the shape of Caloca Fernandes’ A Culinária Paulista Tradicional, in which, conveniently for me, all of the recipes are given in Portugese and English. I’ve picked out one recipe from the book, a simple but delicious-looking chicken dish, Frango a Moda dos Moreiras, which follows below:

My thanks again to Ruud & Bibi!