This Page Has Intentionally Been Left Blank

It’s a dark time of year at these latitudes, notwithstanding the Christmas lights festooning the streets of the town where we live, or the lights in almost every apartment-window, or the whiteness of this winter’s first flurries of snow. The dreariness of the season has inspired in me a certain lassitude, which in turn has contributed towards my negect of this journal, a state of inattention that, alas, will likely continue for another week or two.

Seasonal considerations aside, my home desktop PC is undergoing a difficult metamorphosis which, at present, is stuck at the chrysalis stage. In the meantime, just so there’ll be something here next week, not wanting to intentionally leave this page blank, I thought I would post a couple of details from a fascinating & decidedly weird pen-&-ink drawing entitled Due Pulchinelle (‘Two Punchinellos’) by Giambattista Tiepolo. I have previously made mention of the drawings in a similar vein by Tiepolo’s son, Giandomenico.

I’m grateful to Mr. Maydell, who sent me an e-mail drawing my attention to this image, which he found here. Only later did I realise I had already seen the same picture elsewhere, on this page, which had been my source for one of the younger Tiepolo’s sketches that I’d reproduced before. Oddly, these two versions of this image mirror each other, so I can’t be sure the orientation of the one above is correct. In any case, click on the details to see the image in full.

A Fine, Useful Booklet

In 1525, Albrecht Dürer published his manual Underweysung der Messung (‘Instruction in Measurement’), a pioneering German-language treatise on geometry and perspective. Dürer’s target audience were young, well-educated artists, but, as the use of perspective became more widespread, a need arose to instruct less well-educated artisans in the rudiments of the technique. The incipient market for a Persepective for Dummies was recognised by one Hieronymus Rodler, who, in 1531 published Eyn schön nützlich büchlin und underweisung der kunst des Messens, (‘A Fine, Useful Booklet and Instruction in the Art of Measurement’).

In the preface to his booklet, Rodler wrote that Dürer's work on perspective was too difficult for most people to understand, although he acknowledged the great merits of the work. Rodler’s treatise, ‘written in an easy vernacular and illustrated with a simple elegance,’ was a shorter and a more practical one, and was written for the benefit of ‘painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, embroiderers, masons and carpenters,’ to better enable them to master what would still have been, to many, a novel technique. In simplifying Dürer's system, alas, Rodler broke it, such that it could only be used for certain types of simple composition, being ‘dominated by converging orthogonals, with little sense of measured control over scaled distances into the space.’

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Rodler was employed as a secretary by Johann II, Pfalzgraf und Herzog von der Pfalz-Simmern-Sponheim, (apparently anglicizable as ‘Landgrave of Simmern,’ or ‘Duke of Pfalz-Simmern’), the head of a junior branch of the Wittelsbachs: Simmern being the town where he kept court. The schön nützlich büchlin was one of the first productions of a private press that Rodler had established for his employer. It is not known who designed the book’s woodcuts: Rodler could have made them himself, or, as another theory has it, Johann II. could have been their author, as it is known that he recieved training in the art of woodcutting some time around 1530.

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Some of the woodcuts in the book are purely technical, but others incorporate scenes from life at Simmern’s court: the woodcut on the title page (the first one shown above) shows a workshop wherein a painter, an embroiderer and other craftsmen and their assistants are hard at work. Another (the last one below) shows ‘an artist at work in a room with a grid iron window which permits an easy transfer of the landscape seen through it on a drawing board.’ The present images are details of scans from a reprint edition of the book published in 1970 by Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsansalt, (ADEVA for short), of Graz, Austria: the fourth volume of their Instrumentaria Artium series (of which I have mentioned the second volume before) .

I was unable to find much information about Rodler beyond that he was born in Bamberg, and that he died in 1539. I have quoted and paraphrased most from what I found at these pages, advertising copies of the ‘fine useful booklet’ for sale. There is one other image from the book reproduced here.

Personages

It’s quite likely that I first encountered the name Remedios Varo upon reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 some sixteen or seventeen years ago. But I can’t pretend that this detail lodged in my memory, and when I began happening upon Varo’s name more recently, it was as if for the first time. Even though these notices excited my interest, I neglected to explore her work at greater length until a month or two ago, when, in the post-script of an e-mail, Bill, co-proprietor of the excellent weblog Orbis Quintus, asked me what I thought of her work: I had to reply that I hardly knew it, but that I was curious to find out more.

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My curiosity was assuaged, in part, by the numerous on-line image-galleries devoted to her work, but at the same time I was frustrated that the reproductions therein were all so small. I decided to order a book about Varo, and, naturally considered buying Unexpected Journeys: Janet A. Kaplan’s much-praised biography of the artist. At length, however, I opted to order a copy of the third (‘corrected and enlarged’) edition of the bilingual Catálogo Razonado of Varo’s œuvre, as published by Ediciones ERA of Mexico City in 2002, originally edited by Ricardo Ovalle and Walter Gruen, and revised by Gruen (Varo’s widower) and Anna Alexandra. I obtained the book from Iberoamericana Libros. The present images are details from scans taken from its pages: click on them to see them in full.

It was difficult to choose just a few images from the dozens of beautiful paintings reproduced in this book. I noticed that several works were simply named Personaje (Personage). Elsewhere in the catalogue were an Astral Personage (above), a Feline Personage, an Avian Personage, and a Winged Personage. Evidently these figures were of some importance to their depictor, so I thought they might be as good a starting-point as any. The only statement of Varo’s about any them recorded in the book concerns the second one shown here, and is as follows: Obviously, this person is fleeing with his prey. Due to his haste, some of the embossed motifs on the lower part of his garment leave a trail behind him.

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Most of Varo’s personages bear the delicate heart-shaped face with large almond eyes, long sharp nose, and thick mane of lively hair that marked the artist’s own appearance. The personæ she created thus serve as self-portraits transmuted through fantasy. Despite her warning—“I do not wish to talk about myself because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person”—so much of the work is metaphorically autobiographical that exploring the interplay between her life and her art is essential to understanding her significance—Janet A. Kaplan.

The images above are copyright © Walter Gruen, and are reproduced here without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on these pages.

Making Haste Slowly (from Baltimore to Pittsburgh)

For the last three years my web-hosting needs have been taken care of by Pure Energy Systems of Baltimore. While they have been most helpful, and have provided an eminently reliable service, I have recently found myself bumping up against their disk-space & bandwidth maxima, and have consequently opted to secure some more capacious on-line premises elsewhere—courtesy of Pair Networks, Pittsburgh. I’ve spent this week hauling my web-stuff the 195 miles between the two. A couple of hours ago I changed the name-servers for spamula.net, and it looks like the change is starting to take effect.

I would have preferrred a near-invisible transition between hosts, but it has happened that, in setting up the new Movable Type configuration, I have changed the Giornale’s archiving preferences: the upshot of which will be that old links coming in to individual entries here will go dead. There will probably be other problems too, which I will attempt to resolve in due course—you have my apologies in advance for any inconvenience. I will endeavour to observe the motto Festina Lente and ‘make haste slowly’ a precept illustrated emblematically above (from Alciato, emblem 20) by a javelin, representing swiftness; and a remora, illustrating restraint. Even with the best of intentions, though, one may instead end up making sloth, hastily; and, not having done this before, I am apprehensive of just ending up with the on-line equivalent of a dead suckerfish & an icky javelin…

The remora features in another of Alciato’s emblems, one which warns how an apparently minor hindrance can halt an endeavour, or, as Alciati moralises, how tiny temptations may lead people astray: Small as a snail, the remora is able by itself to stop a ship. It’s disdainful of the force of wind and oars. So some petty circumstance can check in mid-career certain men who are, by genius and by virtue, headed for the stars. Likewise a tormenting law-suit, or a passion for a prostitute, draws youths from their distinguished studies.