Neuw Grottessken Buch

When I ordered the book about Kircher from Ediciones Siruela in Madrid (see the previous entry), I took the opportunity to order a second volume from them, one that had been recommended to me a couple of years ago: their reprint edition of Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularium. I had happened upon Jamnitzer’s work while looking, unsuccessfully, for images from a book published by his grandson, Christoph Jamnitzer (1563-1618): the Neuw Grottessken Buch. A subsequent search at abebooks for this latter title turned up a listing for a copy of a 1966 reprint edition of it at das Antiquariat Donhofer & Moser, of Vienna. I ordered it; it arrived last week: the following images are details of scans from its pages.

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The book comprises sixty-odd spectacularly exuberant, and often quasi-surreal engravings, introduced with an essay by one Heinrich Gerhard Franz. Glancing through the engravings, one notices recurring types of composition: lanscapes populated by putti, near-abstract ornamental patterns, &c. Herr Franz categorises them under ten headings: the first four of the images reproduced here belong to his category #6: Moströse Grottesklebewesen, aus Schnörkel- und Schweifwerkornament… and the remaining two to category #8: Grotteskturniere. Sadly, my solid ignorance of German prevents me extracting much more information from the text than that…

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Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-85) was born in Vienna, but later moved with his family to Nuremberg. Wenzel’s third son Hans (1538-1603) was Christoph’s father. All of them found renown as goldsmiths. Probably Christoph’s most famous work now is Der Mohrenkopfpokal, an elaborately-worked drinking vessel:

The German term pokal signifies a ceremonial drinking vessel, usually tall, with a set-on lid but no handle. Pokals were used for welcoming ceremonies and were typified by their luxurious and fanciful designs […] The form of the Jamnitzer pokal creates an expressive portrait of a young black African. The cup was probably commissioned around 1595 by the powerful Strozzi family of Florence, Italy, for the wedding of Filippo Strozzi and Maria Pucci. It later became the most important work in the treasure of the Wettiner family in Germany. In 1996 the pokal was recovered during excavations in a forest near Dresden in Germany, where it and other precious objects from Moritzburg Castle had been buried in 1945 to hide them from the invading Russian army—source here.

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Jamnitzer’s designs are, perhaps, a high-water-mark of a trend in Northern European mannerist grotesquerie that had begun in Antwerp in the 1550s, with the stylised designs of Cornelis Floris, and which had been continued by such artists and craftsmen as Joris Hoefnagel, in the illuminated alphabet appended to the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta, and by the brothers de Bry, in their Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet of 1595. Click on the details above to see the images in full.

Kircher’s Obelisks

I’m grateful to Mr K. for renewing my interest in Athanasius Kircher, the 17th-century Jesuit writer and scholar. Mr K., also the proprietor of the outstanding new weblog Bibliodyssey, put together a rich selection of links about Kircher at metafilter, and was kind enough to point them out to me, by e-mail, after I returned from vacation, rightly assuming that I’d be interested. Perusing these links, I wondered if there were any new books on Kircher since I’d last checked some five or six years earlier: sure enough there were, and before long I was reading Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, a diverse and interesting collection of essays by various authors, edited by Paula Findlen. Mention of Kircher in a recent post here elicited a recommendation of another book: Athanasius Kircher. Itinerario del Éxtasis o Las Imágenes de un Saber Universal; by Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, which I also ordered, and which arrived here the week before last. This is a big, beautifully-produced volume which reproduces hundreds of the fascinating engraved illustrations from Kircher’s many works. The present images were scanned from the pages of this book.

Strictly speaking, these images are from a volume about Kircher, rather than by him, namely: Romani Collegii Societas Jesu Musæum Celeberrimum, edited by one Georgius de Sepibus, and published in Amterdam in 1678.

The first published catalogue of Kircher’s museum, the frontispiece of which can be seen [above], advertised it as a “theatre of nature and art.” Here Kircher displayed perpetual-motion machines, optical tricks, a mermaid’s tail, the bones of a giant, and a host of other natural and artificial marvels to learned visitors to the Jesuit college in Rome. In the frontispiece are the five wooden obelisks, some of which still survive, constructed by Kircher and his assistants in imitation of the Egyptian obelisks scattered around Rome—source here.

The obelisks of Rome, and the hieroglyphs upon them, were a lifelong fascination of Kircher’s. As early as 1633, at which time Kircher was based in Avignon, he had boasted to the scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Pereisc that he held in his possession a key to decoding the inscriptions on these monuments, in the shape of an ancient manuscript written by a Bablylonian rabbi. Pereisc was intrigued, but came to suspect Kircher was lying, suspicions confirmed in the course of an awkward interview between the two men, in which Kircher agreed only to show Pereisc a single page from the manuscript, a page, in any case, that Pereisc was convinced was not authentic. It was not the only rash and unsubstantiated boast that Kircher had made, and this and other embarrassments may have contributed to his decision to leave Avignon later that year. Kircher ended up in Rome, where he landed squarely on his feet, obtaining a prestigious post at the Collegio Romano. Curiously, this appointment had been encouraged by the influential Pereisc, who continued to support the younger scholar despite having been disappointed by him: we must suppose that the breadth of Kircher’s knowledge, and his intellectual energy, sufficed to propel him past the difficulties caused by his frequent lapses of interpretation and judgement.

Kircher’s studies of the Coptic language and the nature of hieroglyphs throughout the 1630s and ’40s culminated in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus of 1652-4, which detailed at length his over-interpretation of hieroglyphs, which he considered as the highly symbolic encodings of a recondite antediluvian language. For example, ‘this led him to translate simple hieroglyphic texts now known to read as […] “Osiris says” as “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis.” The three-volume Oedipus Aegyptiacus was preceded by a lesser work entitled Obeliscus Pamphilius, issued in the jubilee year of 1650, which celebrated the erection of the obelisk at the centre of Bernini’s famous Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona. Kircher was unaware that this particular obelisk was not even Egyptian, but rather a 1st-Century Roman copy.

A further obelisk-related book, Obeliscus Aegyptiacus, was published in 1666, nearly coinciding with the completion of another obelisk in a sculptural setting by Bernini, that of the elephant in the Piazza dell Minerva—see the image immediately above. This was one of the Obelisci Isei Campensis: a group of ‘several small obelisks found at different times near the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, which were probably brought to Rome during the first century and grouped in pairs, with others, at the entrances of the temple of Isis’—(source). The paired images further above show details of the Lateran obelisk (the oldest and tallest in Rome), the ‘Sallustian’ oeblisk (another Roman copy), and the ‘Constantinopolitan’ and Pamphilian obelisks. Click on the details to see the source images in full.

The Republic of Dreams

By way of a search at abebooks, I learned of an exhibition that was staged at the Lijnbaancentrum, Rotterdam in 1983 entitled Imaginaire Landen, which collected various artworks that mapped or described imaginary locales. When I read that among the artists and writers represented in the show were Luigi Serafini, Donald Evans and Harry Mulisch, I was intrigued enough to order a copy of the exhibition catalogue. This, when it arrived, turned out to be a box containing numerous unbound leaflets, with sundry additional items, including: a box of matches bearing the name of a non-existent airline (syldavski aerolinieny), a weird card-game, a button-badge, numerous maps, blueprints, charts and tables, schematics of dreamt-up metro networks, a musical score, and even a little bag containing coarse black sand, some pebbles, and a broken cockle-shell, purportedly from the imaginary island of Atipé. Of all the imagined lands therein, perhaps the most beguiling to my eye was Jerry Crimmins’s La République de Rêves (‘The Republic of Dreams’) which was represented in the catalogue by a train ticket (above left), some maps, and a tourist-information brochure. I was delighted by the thought of a city in which one could walk from the Icarus Dirigible Port to the Park of the Alluring Mannequins by way of the Ave. of Swift and Invisible Nudes, Blvd. Max Ernst, and Soluble Fish and Liquid Bells St. Crimmins published a ‘Visitors Guide to La Républic de Rêves’ as long ago as 1980. An expanded ‘reverie’ on the subject was published in 1998.

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Leafing through the multiplicity of invented places in this box, and the artefacts ostensibly therefrom, felt like listening to a babble of unfamiliar languages, a league-of-nations without interpreters. The fact that most of the explanatory text was in Dutch placed me at one further remove from the material, and led me to ponder what common impetus there might be behind the creation of imaginary lands, languages, cultures, worlds. It’s an impulse I have experienced myself: even as a child (I can’t have been more than seven or eight years old), I recall dividing up the floor-space in the apartment where we lived into different notional ‘countries,’ such that my toy cars could undertake epic international journeys—and I recall the importance I attached to naming these regions, and drawing maps that traced their boundaries…

As usual, my ponderings didn’t bring me to any useful conclusions: in any case, there could well be as many world-building motives as there are imaginations: some worlds may be improvements on one that their creators feel to be far too imperfect; others are resorts to which their proprietors may steal away as though on vacation; others still are child-like games in their designers’ minds: and while some invented worlds demand attention; many more, surely, are artfully concealed behind bland portals in the most mundane settings—behind mirrors, under bridges, in old encyclopædias, or behind seemingly unremarkable hyperlinks somewhere on the internet…

Click on the images above to see them enlarged and in context. To see the reverse of the train ticket shown top left, click here, and to see the remainder of the tourist guide, click here.

Redon, Again

I’ve mentioned the work of the French artist Odilon Redon before, and that I particularly admire his darkly atmospheric works in charcoal from the late 1870s and early 1880s. Thanks to the efforts of Mr. T_____, I was reunited last week with three boxfuls of books that I’d left behind in storage in England in 2000, at which time I never suspected that the six-month contract I had secured in Sweden would turn into a five-year sojourn. One of these books is a monograph on Redon published to coincide with an exhibition I had visited at the Royal Academy in London, 1995. I’ve scanned a half dozen images from this book:

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The first and fifth of these images were two of thirteen drawings that were exhibited at the galleries of the weekly review La Vie Moderne in Paris in 1881: which was effectively Redon’s first solo exhibition. A second, larger exhibition followed in 1882, again courtesy of the press: it was staged at the telegraph office of the daily newspaper Le Gaulois. The two images directly below were among the twenty-one works on display there.

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Das Esseintes found himself more particularly drawn to the other works which decorated the room. Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a dreadful spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams… Huysmans, A Rebours (‘Against Nature’), Margaret Mauldon’s translation.

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All of the images here are more-or-less cropped & reduced versions of the ones I scanned from the book: click on them to see them larger, and in full

September CD Giveaway

Wednesday, August 31st, was the fifth anniversary of our first arrival into Sweden. To mark this event, I will give away some stuff this month, beginning with a fourth batch of fifteen CDs. Peruse the list of CDs below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed or not: if not, then leave a comment stating which of the CDs you want. Once you have laid claim to the disc of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. In a few days’ time, I’ll sort through the requests, and will decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a CD will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the discs within a week or so. I’m limiting the offer to two CDs per recipient.

1. Antonio Vivaldi’s Works for Lute, performed by Jakob Lindberg, Nils-Erik Sparf, Tullo Galli, Monica Huggett, and the Drottningholms Barockensemble. I picked this disc up at a second-hand book-store in the town where I live. It is eminently pleasant music, very well recorded, but is a disc I have only ever listened through a handful of times.

2. Georg Frederic Händel’s Suites for Keyboard, performed by Keith Jarrett. This is another disc bought cheaply at the same second-hand place as the one above, and which has suffered the same unfortunate neglect while in my care, despite the elegance of the music and the fine quality of its playing.

3. The Concerto Project, volume I, featuring a pair of fairly recent compositions by Philip Glass. Julian Lloyd Webber is the soloist for the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, while Evelyn Glennie and Jonathan Haas take the lead parts in the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra. The orchestra, In both cases, is the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. For every CD of Glass’s music that I buy & love, it seems there must be another than I can’t bing myself to enjoy—this disc falls into the latter category.

4. Berlin Cabaret Songs, by various composers, sung (in German) by Ute Lemper, accompanied by the Matrix Ensemble. I bought this CD of at least five years ago—I forget from where—it’s a selection of 1920s night-club standards, many of them satirical or suggestive, which were later designated as Entartete Musik (‘Degenerate Music’) by the Nazi government. I used to listen to this quite often, but have all but ignored it for the past few years.

5. The Carl Stalling Project: ‘Music From Warner Bros.Cartoons, 1936-1958.’ This is a collection of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies soundtracks minus the voices and sound-effects, some presented singly, others grouped into extended medleys, which, while fascinating to hear once, isn’t something I feel like revisting.

6. Sun Ra and his Arkestra’s Greatest Hits. I wasn’t aware that they’d had any hits, as such, but I was curious to hear some of this eccentric band’s music, having been intrigued by the odd snippet I’d read or heard about it here and there. Alas, I have a bit of a tin ear as regards jazz, which has frustrated most of my efforts at broadening my musical horizons in that direction—and this disc, like most of my jazz-dabblings, just left me a bit cold.

7. Seven Days of Falling, by the Esbjörn Svesson Trio. One notable exception to my bad experiences with jazz, was my discovery of the music of the contemporary trio The Bad Plus. At Amazon and elsewhere I saw recommendations which suggested that if I liked The Bad Plus, I would probably also enjoy this acclaimed Swedish trio. In my case, however, this did not apply…

8. Let it Die, by Leslie Feist. Having admired Ms. Feist’s contributions to the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People, I was interested to hear this widely-praised solo album. At the crunch, though, I found I disliked some ‘congested’ quality in her voice: it’s as though she we singing through a head-cold.

9. Bee Hives is a B-sides and rarities compilation by Broken Social Scene, whose other two albums were among my most-played discs earlier this year, following my overdue discovery of this fine Canadian band. As it happens, I’m just not quite enough of a fan to merit keeping a hold of this item. I’m looking forward to their new, eponymously-titled effort due for release next month, however.

10. The Arcade Fire E.P.: I enjoyed Funeral almost as much as the next weblogger, but wasn’t so taken with this, their recently-reissued and remastered début E.P.

11. Get Behind Me Satan by The White Stripes. I didn’t like this disc nearly as much as White Blood Cells and Elephant. I still didn’t hear their first two albums: are they any good?

12. Camper van Beethoven’s New Roman Times made me feel old. I loved CvB when they were first on the go, and keenly regret that I narrowly missed seeing them in concert in London, a matter of weeks before they broke up. While this new release has a lot of the same eclectic spirit as their earlier work, the sense of fun that was one of their most endearing characteristics just doesn’t seem to have survived their regrouping. Or it could just be me, getting old.

13. Susumu Yokota’s Sakura. In the MeFi CD swap earlier this year I received a CD including two delightful tracks of Yokota’s. To follow this up, I ordered Sakura from Amazon, but found the tracks thereupon didn’t grab me in the same way as those others, the names of which I forget.

14. Handwriting, by Khonnor. I’ve seen a few reviews claim that Khonnor will be the next big thing, and, indeed he is a talented artist with a knack for atmospherically blending electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Sadly for me, as with #8 above, I couldn’t get past the ‘blocked-up’ quality of Khonnor’s voice, which put me right off his music.

15. Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding by The Venetian Snares. Although I was quite impressed by this disc of shinily elaborate electronic compositions, I didn’t really warm to it, and reckon, like all the other CDs above, it could find a better home elsewhere.