Theatrum Mortis

Janez Vaijkard Valvasor (1641-93), also known as Johann Weichard (or Wiechert, or Wieckart, or Weikhard) Valvasor, was a man of many accompishments: a soldier, and military commander who was also a scholar— an historian & historiographer; a geographer, ethnographer & cartographer; a natural scientist; and a collector, painter and publisher. He was born in what is now Ljubljana, Slovenia, then better-known as Laibach, the principal city in the Austrian-ruled Duchy of Carniola. During the 1670s, he developed ambitious plans to write and publish a variety of illustrated treatises on a range of subjects, and to this end he set up his own publishing concern at his home at Bogenšperk Castle. Between 1679 and 1689 he issued a series of works, culminating in a 15-volume opus entitled Die Ehre deß Herzogthums Crain ‘The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola,’ ‘a genuine encyclopedia of natural science, local customs and folklore, history, and topography that covered a large part of present-day Slovenia, Istria and surrounding regions.’

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While most of Valvasor’s works partook of the spirit of scientific inquiry, and were based on painstaking research and the careful observation of natural phenomena, at least one other of his publications hints, meanwhile, that this spirit coexisted with a decidedly conventional moral and religious outlook: this was his Theatrum Mortis Humanæ Tripartitum, of 1682: an emblem-book of sorts devoted to the subject of Death. As its title states, the book is in three parts. The first, and longest section is a todten-danz a ‘dance of death’ in which Death, personified as a skeleton, is shown surprising figures representative of all ranks & professions, from Popes and Emperors, by way of Merchants and Soldiers, to Beggars, Dotards and Infants. Each encounter is illustrated by an engraving, and is accompanied by some verses in Latin and German, often in the form a brief dialogue between Death and his chosen victim.

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In the book’s second section, Varia Genera Mortis, we are presented with a catalogue of notable deaths: many of its pages are devoted to the demises of historical or legendary personages. While a couple of these have some element of black comedy about them (such as the dramatist Æschylus’s death by falling tortoise, shown in the detail below), the prevailing mood is one of cruelty and grim suffering. Other pages show unnamed victims of persecution and punishment: buryings, hangings & impalements; while in one scene (the second of the details that follow) we see some unfortunate fellows being pursued & bitten by a dragon. As bad as these scenes are, Valvasor was evidently keen to emphasise that these were as nothing when compared with the torments that awaited the souls of the damned, as vividly documented in the book’s third section, Varia Tormenta Damnatorum.

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The present images are details of scans taken from a reprint of the Theatrum published by Georg Olms Verlag in 2004. Click on them to see them enlarged, and in full. The book’s illustrations were the work of one Johann (or Janez) Koch (ca. 1650-1705). Some of these illustrations are also supposed to be viewable here, although up to now, I’ve been unable to get them to work.

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The final pair of details above show, respectively, a former coveter of his neighbour’s wife unwillingly submitting to some impromptu surgery administered by a pair of demons with a large saw, and a soul guilty of the deadly sin of sloth, about to recieve a sharp wake-up call…

Gnoli’s ‘Modern Bestiary’

It was nearly two and a half years ago that I caught sight of an intruguing illustration posted by Signor Mori at his weblog, Cipango. I mentioned in a comment there that I hadn’t previously heard of its author, Domenico Gnoli, to which Sig. Mori replied that ‘Gnoli was actually a precocious genius, and precociously died. His works, quite strangely, are almost completely absent on the Internet. Maybe you should buy a book about him (I bought many!) and scan a few pictures on your site…”

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It took me a while, but I eventually got around to ordering a copy of L’opera grafica di Domenico Gnoli, which was published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore in 1985. The present images are a half-dozen details of a set of drawings dating from 1968, and collectively entitled Bestiario Moderno, or, Cos’è un mostro, ‘What is a monster?’ Click on the details to see the pictures in full. These particular designs had first been printed in the 1983 volume about Gnoli published by FMR.

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Gnoli was born in Rome in 1933. He studied in that city’s Accademia delle Belle Arti and also studied with the graphic artist Carlo Alberto Petrucci. His first exhibition, again in Rome, was in 1950. Gnoli first achieved renown as a theatre designer—the scenery and costumes he designed for a production of the Merchant of Venice in Zürich in 1953 led to a commission to do the same for an As You Like It in London, which was eventually staged in 1955. From 1956, however, Gnoli chose to devote his efforts to painting and illustration.

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Numerous exhibitions and commissions followed, and Gnoli travelled a great deal, variously living in Paris, New York and London. In 1962, a fairy-tale he had written and illustrated was published—in English—as ‘Orestes, or, the Art of Smiling.’ By 1968, his work was in great demand in the US, with commissions that year from, among others, Sports Illustrated and Fortune. He died in New York in 1970.

De Gheyn

The painter and graphic artist Jacques (or Jacob) de Gheyn was born in Antwerp in 1565. His father, also called Jacques, was a glass-painter, printmaker, and miniaturist. Jacques Jr. ‘lived in Haarlem between 1585 and 1590, where he trained as a printmaker with Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), the standard-bearer of Dutch Mannerism’ and ‘in Amsterdam from 1590 to 1595, where he consolidated his own career as a printmaker and publisher and trained various disciples,’ foremost of whom was Zacharias Dolendo, who made the print shown in the detail below, Saturn as Melancholy, after a design of de Gheyn’s, ca. 1595/6. Dolendo is said by a contemporary biographer as having ‘drank and danced himself to death;’ de Gheyn, too, is supposed to have led a rather dissolute life while in Amsterdam.

In 1595, Jacques married, and moved to the university city of Leiden, where he developed contacts with such notable figures as the jurist Hugo Grotius, the botanist Carolus Clusius, and the poet and emblematist Daniel Heinsius. During his time in Leiden, de Gheyn gradually turned from printmaking to painting, developing a particular interest in (and aptitude for) painting flowers and animals naer het leven, ‘from the life.’ In 1600 he finished his first still-life painting in oils, and, over the subsequent few years, he produced a remarkable ‘series of nearly two dozen exquisite watercolours of naturalia, now bound in an album housed in the Lugt Collection at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.’ The following pair of details show two of these watercolours.

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The Lugt Album, as it is now known, was purchased in 1604 by ‘Europe’s most renowned collector of natural and artificial wonders,’ the emperor Rudolf II. In these paintings, de Gheyn employed the techniques of miniature painting he had learned from his father. As painstakingly-observed but seemingly ‘unfinished’ compositions, they would seem to form an elaborate ‘model book,’ were it not for their having been set down on costly vellum, and decorated with gold leaf—suggesting that de Gheyn had hoped all along they might catch the eye of a wealthy collector. In style and execution they resemble the miniatures of Hans Bol and Joris Hoefnagel. By the time of the album’s completion and sale, de Gheyn and his family had moved to The Hague, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

My source for these images, by the way, is a book entitled Art, Science and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland, by Claudia Swan. This volume takes as its starting-point the contrast between de Gheyn’s painstaking renderings of naturalia done naer het leven, and the same artist’s drawings and prints of ‘foreboding landscapes, gypsies and witches,’ done nyt den gheest, ‘from the mind or spirit.’ The detail above, of a 1604 drawing entitled Witches in a Cellar, is an example of the latter category. These twin threads in de Gheyn’s work are never seen together, with one particular exception: a fascinating page on which a lifelike study of a hermit crab is juxtaposed with a sketchier group of grotesque figures—the following pair of details show two portions of this one page.

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While it could simply be that de Gheyn sketched the crab with the bizarre group just to save paper, Swan suggests a possible (although tenuous) link between them, inasmuch as crabs were often portrayed as symbols of inconstancy and contrariness, and specifically linked by some contemporary writers with witchcraft. One is quoted as explaining that witches ‘turn their backs toward the Demons when they go to worship them, and approach them sideways like a crab.’ More generally, Swan speculates that de Gheyn’s portrayals of witches are partly founded in the belief, then gaining currency in the United Provinces, that these women were the pitiable victims of delusion, rather than malignant agents of the devil.

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Beyond his successes as an engraver and a flower-painter (at which he was reckoned by many of his peers as the superior of Jan Bruegel the Elder), de Gheyn also painted historical scenes, and allegorical still lifes. He died in The Hague in 1629. His son—a third Jacques—had become a successful artist in his own right. Even near to his death, de Gheyn was still looking at ways of mirroring nature in paint, and was considering a project to depict, with the aid of a microscope, ‘those smallest objects and insects with a very fine brush,’ intended for compilation in a book to be entitled ‘The New World.’

Pictorial Stones

The second of the four fascinating essays in the Lithuanian-born art-historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ book Aberrations is entitled Pictorial Stones and is concerned with the varieties of natural imagery found in marbles, agates, alabasters, and the like; and with the kinds of artificial imagery painted upon such stones. The plates in the book include some fine examples of the former: including ‘ruiniform marbles,’ ‘landscape stones,’ and slabs of jasper bearing weirdly organic patterns. Stones such as these were highly prized in early modern Europe, and many found their way into the collections and cabinets of that era’s connoisseurs.

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Sometimes, patterned stones were further embellished with painted decoration. The Augsburg merchant Philipp Hainhofer was a specialist in works like these, and included fine examples of decorated stones in the cabinets he supplied to Philip II, the duke of Pomerania, and to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In the latter cabinet were a maritime battle scene painted on marble, after a design by Jacques Callot: and a pair of remarkable paintings on agate by one Johann König (1586-1635). A detail from one of these ‘The Last Judgement’ is shown below. Click on it to see a larger detail, or click here to see a black-and-white image of the piece almost in full. The Augsburg cabinet sent to Gustavus Adolphus, is, remarkably, still largely complete, and its contents are on display at the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala.

Hainhofer sourced his pictorial stones from Italy, and often referred to them as ‘Florentine stones.’ In one letter he wrote about ‘those Florentine stones in which Nature herself has depicted cities, towers and roofs.’ Another famous owner of such a stone was the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. His petrified Urbs Turrita (as shown in the detail below) was the subject one of the hundreds of illustrations in his three-volume geological treatise Mundus Subterraneus. Other illustrations showed examples of texts seemingly spontaneously etched into stones, and of unexplained images of beasts, birds, and human figures likewise cast in stone.

Another type of images in stone (one not mentioned in Baltrušaitis’ essay) which were in great demand in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, were commessi di pietre dure, mosaic-like compositions carefully formed from judiciously selected and expertly cut pieces of semi-precious stone. One of the earliest masters of this art was a Florentine named Cosimo Castrucci. His work was avidly collected by the emperor Rudolf II., whose patronage persuaded Castrucci’s son Giovanni to move to Prague, where he established a workshop to produce pietre dure pieces for the Rudolfine court. The pair of details below are from two pieces produced by this workshop.

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The art of pietre dure stone-cutting flourished in Florence well into the 18th Century (and is still practised there today). It found its most extravagant expression in the Altar of the Capella dei Principi at the church of San Lorenzo—sadly I’ve not been able to find any good pictures of this on-line. The pages of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure offer some more information about this lapidary art. I have variously scanned the present images from Aberrations (the first two above), from Pautrick Mauries’ Cabinets of Curiosities (the third above, and the one below), from Athanasius Kircher: Itinerario del Éxtasis o Las Imágenes de un Saber Universal ed. Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, (the fourth one above), and from Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City ed. Eliška Fučiková, et al. (the two immediately above).

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