Venetian Roofs

A Venice where gondolas come to rest on rooftops, and silhouettes float in the sky: this is the strange locale traced in words and pictures by Italian artist Daniele Scarpa Kos, in his tale Tetti Veneziani (‘Venetian Roofs’), a new addition here at SPAMULA.NET.

Besides the web-page, as linked above, I also made a 9-page, 4.6 Mb PDF version of it. The present images are details from the tale’s illustrations: click on them to see the images in full.

Abito all’ultimo piano di un vecchio palazzo veneziano.

Tra pochi mesi cambierò casa, devo trasferirmi fuori città, ma per ora non ci penso e passo tutto il tempo libero seduto sul balcone della mia camera a disegnare il panorama dei tetti…

The images and quoted text above are Copyright © 2006 Daniele Scarpa Kos.

The Golden House Revisited

After writing here recently about grotesque art, and its origins in the late-15th-century excavations of Nero’s Domus Aurea, I ordered a book reproducing some eighteeenth-century representations of the Golden House’s decorative frescoes: the following images are details of scans from its pages. I learned a little more about the origins and the development of the grotesque from the book’s two essays, by Gianni Guadalupi and Marie-Noëlle Pinot Villechenon.

The artist responsible for supervising the Domus Aurea’s decoration has variously been named as Fabullus, Famulus or Amulius. His work apparently exemplifies what has become known as the ‘fourth Pompeian style’ of Roman art, which, as far as I can make out, combined illusionistic and figurative elements in ‘theatrical’ settings, and incorporated an abundance of ornament. The Domus Aurea paintings are said to exhibit a ‘more mannerist use of bright colours’ than was the norm for this style.

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Guadalupi writes that the first artist to employ the grotesque style after the re-discovery of the Domus Aurea was probably Filippino Lippi, in some of the decorative work in the Frescoes he painted between 1489-93 at the Carafa Chapel of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. In describing the diffusion of the grotesque style via Raphael’s circle, the Fontainebleau school, etc., Pinot Villechenon adds that the style was introduced to the Spanish court by the Portuguese-born artist Francisco d’Ollanda (or, Francisco de Holanda), who had drawn meticulous copies of the Domus Aurea frescoes during a sojourn in Rome ca. 1538.

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The rooms of Nero’s buried palace were gradually stripped of their treasures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it wasn’t until 1683 that a systematic excavation of the site was undertaken. One of the fruits of this archæological project was the publication, in 1706, by Pietro Sante Bartoli and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, of the first book illustrating in detail what had been found there: Le pitture antiche delle grotte di Roma… Throughout the eighteenth century, further volumes of prints thrilled successive generations of enthusiasts with illustrations of the treasures found in the continuing excavations in Rome, and at Pomepii and Herculaneum.

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Around 1774, a Roman patron of the arts named Ludovico Mirri began a project to illustrate the interior decor of what were then mistakenly assumed to be the ruins of the Baths of Titus, but which, in fact, formed part of the Domus Aurea complex. He employed three artists: Vincezo Brenna, an architect and draughtsman from Vicenza; the Polish-born painter Francesco Smuglewicz; and Marco Carloni, a Roman engraver and printer. An antiquary named Giuseppe Carletti provided a commentary. In addition to the standard album of large prints, Mirri published a small number (no more than thirty copies in all) of the same plates hand-tinted in watercolour, with gouache highlights.

The present images belong to a unique series of the same prints now at the Louvre, which were coloured entirely in bright gouache. It is not known if they were a one-off commissioned from Mirri, or if they are a similarly singular set from a later edition of Vestigia delle Terme di Tito e Loro Interne Pitture, issued by Carletti. The strong colouration is, apparently, more a reflection of neoclassical tastes than it is an accurate representation of the original frescoes. Also, in some instances, Brenna and Smuglewicz are supposed to have invented some details in order to fill lacunæ in their originals…

The Ninth ‘Giornale Nuovo’ Free Book Giveaway

It’s high time for the ninth of the Giornale’s free book giveaways. Peruse the mixed bag of books below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed: and, if it hasn’t, then leave a comment of your own stating which of the books it is that you want. Once you have laid claim to the volume of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. I’ll sort through the requests to decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a book will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the books within a week or so (I will pay all postage costs). I’m limiting the offer to one book per recipient.

 

1. The Writings of John Evelyn, edited by Guy de la Bédoyère. This handy volume includes several of the famous diarist’s works, including some early satirical screeds, such as his 1656 Character of England, his anti-pollution tract Fumifugium, and the first edition of his famous work on arboriculture: Sylva, (‘Or, a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesties Dominions’). I had ordered a copy from the publisher, only to receive a reply that they were out-of-stock. Assuming the order to have been cancelled, I was surprised when they delivered a copy a few months later, after I’d meanwhile tracked down another one. This is an unjacketed hardback: ISBN: 0851156312; 435pp.

2. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I remember this as the last-but-one book I read before leaving England for Sweden, back in 2000. I found the central storyline, what Danielewski calls ‘The Navidson Record,’ intriguing enough, but was bored and irritated by the affected manner of its presentation, and didn’t much care for the narrative frame in which it was parcelled: I can’t recall now how it ended. Some people loved it, however: Brett Easton Ellis’s jacket-copy exclaims ‘A great novel. A phenomenal début. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent.’ My copy is from the original standard UK paperback edition of the book, published under the Anchor imprint. ISBN: 1862301107; 736pp.

 

3. Scepsis Scientifica, or Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science by Joseph Glanvill. Having read Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus: ‘or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions’ I sought out a couple more of this author’s works. This volume contains a lengthy pro-Cartesian, anti-Aristotelian argument, bound together with a similarly polemical defence of an earlier volume of his, The Vanity of Dogmatizing. Much as I enjoy the tenor of seventeenth-century prose, I couldn’t help finding this volume for the most part rather dry. It’s a facsimile of a 1665 edition, reprinted by Georg Olms Verlag in 1985, as vol III. of their series of Glanvill’s Collected Works. ISBN: 3487026899 approx. 324 pp.

4. The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak, translated from the Turkish by Müge Gõçek. ‘Every now and again an absolute gem of a novel arrives and is tragically ignored by all and sundry,’ wrote one reviewer of Shafak’s tale, set in a run-down Istanbul apartment-block. I can’t say I ignored it, but nor could I get into it, and abandoned the book after a few dozen pages: the writing (or, perhaps, the translation) seeming rather stilted to me. This is a cheaply-made paperback edition published by Marion Boyars in 2004. ISBN 0714531014; 448pp.

 

5. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s To Charles Fort, With Love. I’d seen a good deal of praise for Kiernan’s writing: one blurb has it that ‘Kiernan ranks as one of today's finest practitioners of “the art of disquiet,” […] Her enigmatic short stories are written in lyrical prose that sweeps the reader completely into strange dark worlds where characters choose to embrace madness over the mundane.’ Words like these helped steer this collection of tales into my cart when I placed an order at the Subterranean Press a few months ago. I was quite disappointed, though, when I came to read it: to my eye, only a couple of these pieces really sparkled. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, that such a disappointment likely owes more to my limitations as a reader than to hers as a writer. ISBN: 1596060344; 270pp

6. A selection of the Poems of Edith Södergran, translated from the Swedish by Gounil Brown, illustrated with drawings by Joy Griffiths. I’ve owned this little volume of poetry by the tubercular Södergran for many years, but it’s been a long while since I last looked into it: her poems are often (understandably) suffused with a melancholy gloom, but are lit up here & there by occasional flashes of visionary insight. Brown has posted a few of her translations on-line, here. This (paperback) book was published by the Zena Press in 1990. ISBN: 0951106953; 102pp.

 

7. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. In the words of the publisher’s blurb: ‘Before he trailed off into the wilds of Mexico, never to be heard from again, Ambrose Bierce achieved a public persona as “bitter Bierce” and “the devil’s lexicographer.” He left behind a nasty reputation and more than ninety short stories that are perfect expressions of his sardonic genius’ While I’d greatly enjoyed the morsels of Bierce’s prose that I’d read prior to buying this collection, I found it surprisingly difficult to digest, and ultimately off-putting—I haven’t felt like returning to Bierce’s work since reading this six or seven years ago. This paperback edition is courtesy of the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison imprint. ISBN: 0803260717; 496pp.

8. The Rampage by Miroslav Holub, translated from the Czech by David Young and Dana Hábová. This was the last volume of Holub’s poetry to appear in English before his death in 1998. While I’d often perused the immunologist-poet’s collections Poems Before & After and Vanishing Lung Syndrome, I found I was much less often drawn into this one, perhaps because by the time it was published, I was reading considerably less poetry of all kinds than I had in my early twenties, say. This is a copy of the 1997 Faber & Faber paperback edition. ISBN: 057119253X; 84pp.

 

9. The Portrait of Eccentricity (‘Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque’), by Giancarlo Maiorino. This book is concerned with a corner of art-history of particular interest to me, yet it is written in such an obfuscatory (I suppose neo-mannerist) dialect of academic-ese that I found reading it a chore which I soon abandoned. I would have kept the book for its illustrations, had they not all been black-&-white. If you are comfortable with phrases like ‘'a metalanguage of artificial exaggerations of the “Other,”’ then this could be the book for you! It’s a paperback issued by the Penn State University Press. ISBN: 0271023201; 182pp.

10. Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe, subtitled ‘The Search for Laws of Self-organisation and Complexity.’ This has been sitting on my shelves since I read it circa 1998. I don’t remember much about the book, beyond that I found Kauffman’s treatment of complexity theory very interesting, but that meanwhile its combination of above-my-head theory and flattish prose made it feel a bit like hard work. ‘Kaufmann brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science—and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos,’ says the blurb. This is a UK Penguin paperback. ISBN: 1892295962; 332pp.

Morghen and the Moon

At some time between 1764 and 1772, the printmaker Filippo Morghen (ca. 1730-1808), a Florentine based in Naples, issued a curious set of ten etchings under the title Raccolta delle cose più notabili veduta dal cavaliere Wilde Scull, e dal sigr: de la Hire nel lor famoso viaggio dalla terra alla Luna, ‘A Collection of the most notable things seen by Sir Wilde Scull, and by M. de la Hire, in their famous voyage from the Earth to the Moon.’ Details from six of these prints follow below. The first of them shows part of the title-sheet, which describes the contents of the other etchings in the set, and dedicates them to ‘Guglielmo Amilton,’ that is to William Hamilton, then the British ambassador to the Neapolitan court.

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The detail above is part of a scene depicting ‘a savage mounted on a winged serpent, fighting a monster resembling a porcupine.’ The one immediately below shows the same kind of spiny beast being lured toward a contraption intended to split it from head to tail. In the second image below, we are presented with a sail-powered lunar carriage. The remaining pair of details show ‘gourds that serve as dwellings safe from monsters,’ and ‘a boat that has as for a sail an enormous bird.’ The etchings’ ‘ornamental passages of chinoiserie,’ remind us that China would still then have been alien enough to most Europeans, that it might as well have been another world…

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Morghen had arrived in Naples in 1752, to join the team of artists appointed by King Charles III. of Spain (also Charles VII. of the two Sicilies) then assembling an eight-volume opus documenting Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (The Antiquities discovered in Herculaneum). Besides these archæological illustrations, Morghen also produced Vedute (‘views’) of other local antiquities and of the picturesque environs of Naples: these found ready buyers in the ‘grand tourists’ (many of whom were English), for whom that city was a fashionable destination. Between 1766 and 1769, Morghen executed a series of forty vedute, published as Le Antichità di Pozzuoli, Baja, e Cuma which he individually dedicated to native noblemen or distinguished foreigners, Hamilton and his (first) wife among them.

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While Morghen seems to have invented the name of one of his astronauts—Sir Wilde Scull—the other, Philippe de la Hire was that of an historical fugure, a notable astronomer and mathematician. Apparently, in a later printing of his Raccolta, Morghen replaced Sir Wilde’s name with John Wilkins’s… A few more of Morghen’s prints can be seen here. The Raccolta, I notice, was recently mentioned here. I am much obliged to Michelangelo for bringng these images to my attention.

Jean Mignon

‘In 1531, after several disappointments with the greatest artists of his time—particularly Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto who both came to France—François I, extraordinarily tenacious in his plan to acclimatize monumental Italian painting to his kingdom, invited a painter of lesser reputation, but young and marvellously gifted: the Florentine Rosso. A year later it was Primaticcio who was invited in his turn, on the recommendation of Giulio Romano, Raphael’s official heir, in whom François I had great confidence. Even younger than Rosso and still unknown, Primaticcio was to show the greatest talent; in the course of nearly forty years, he worked assiduously on the decorations of the Château. Each of these two great masters had his international staff of workers and artists, among whom Italians predominated…’

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Perhaps foremost among the assistants recruited by Rosso was a fellow-Florentine named Luca Penni, who had apparently studied in Rome, where one of his brothers had been an assistant of Raphael’s. Penni’s style has been described as one of ‘refined heaviness’ and ‘cold beauty.’ Besides painting, he also made designs for tapestries and prints: in the 1540s, it is thought that several of his designs were etched by one Jean Mignon, whose name has been found in the Fontainebleau accounts for 1537-40, when he seems to have been a junior assistant painter. Mignon has been identified as the ‘J.M.’ who signed a couple of the prints associated with the Fontainebleau school—whereupon several dozen other unsigned prints have more or less tentatively been attributed to him based on likenesses of content and style.

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The two pairs of etchings shown in the details above, and a number of other similarly-executed compositions on religious and mythological themes, are all thought to derive from designs of Penni’s. Mignon’s name has also been linked with a fascinating series of twenty etchings (exemplified here by the two pairs of details, below), illustrating a variety of ‘terminals’ which are quadrangular pillars, often tapered & narrowest at the base, and adorned with sculpted figures, the heads or busts of men, women or satyrs. Terminals were originally representations of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, ‘guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing,’ and were used as elaborate boundary-markers.

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These etchings in particular caught my eye as they reminded me of two sets of intriguing images posted by Mr. K. at Bibliodyssey some time ago, featuring the designs of Hughes Sambin, and Joseph Boillot. I scanned the present images from Henri Zerner’s book The School of Fontainebleau; Etchings and Engravings, published by Thames and Hudson in 1969, translated from the French by Stanley Baron. Much of the above paraphrases Zerner, or, as in the case of the opening paragraph, directly quotes him. Zerner summarises Mignon’s (and, I suppose, Penni’s) achievement thus: ‘He installed his figures in very contrived, very formal landscapes with artificial vegetation. The result was an unreal world, as if turned to stone, one of the most uncompromising expressions of mannerism.’

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