Basoli’s Alphabet

In Bologna, in 1839, the decorative artist Antonio Basoli published his Alfabeto Pittorico, ossia raccolta di pensieri pittorici composti di oggetti comincianti dalle singole lettere alfabetiche (‘Pictorial Alphabet, or, a collection of pictorial thoughts composed of objects beginning with the individual letters of the alphabet’). This was an album of twenty-five elaborate lithographs, each one featuring an alphabetical character cast in some fantastic architectural form, in a setting contrived to illustrate any number of figures and objects for which there were Italian words beginning with that same letter. A commentary in Italian and French explained the contents of the plates. Below are details from the lithographs representing the five vowels from this alphabet (plus one other additional image), scanned from a reproduction of the Alfabeto Pittorico issued in 1998 by Ravensburger, with translations of Basoli’s text into German and English, and with additional commentary and notes by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel.

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We find the acute-angled A, then, in an Arabian orangery (aranciera), two ancient ploughs (aratri antichi) adorning the feet of the initial, atop which is an eagle (aquila). The E adjoins an exedra in a garden near ancient Herculaneum (Ercolano), whose vegetation supposedly includes ivy (edera), mustard (eruca), (h)ellebore, endives, spurge (euforbio), heather (erica), and wild radish (erisimo). The I is in a hippodrome (ippodromo) on the island of Ithaca in the Ionian sea, whereas the O, presumably fashioned of oyster-stone (ostricata), writes Basoli, is set in Oriental gardens (orti) where patrons with umbrellas (ombrelli) stroll, admiring the obelisks and sundials (orologi solari). By the time we reach U, Basoli seems to be flagging a little: he writes that this letter stands in a university town in ‘Hunnish’ (unnico) Germany—perhaps, although Basoli doesn’t mention it, this structure is in urban Ulm…

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Further to the twenty-four letters he illustrated, Basoli also executed one additional lithograph depicting an ampersand, which, he writes, ‘functions as a kind of index to the work, or rather a visual pot-pourri in which a multitude of objects whose individual names all begin with one of the 24 letters of the alphabet shall appear to be united.’ Basoli (1774-1848) was born in Bologna, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, thereafter gradually making a name for himself as a specialist decorator and scene-painter. He is known to have travelled to Venice and Ferrara in 1803, and to Florence, Rome and Milan in 1805. The latter journey included an inspirational visit to La Scala, then apparently a centre of scenographic excellence. In the years that followed, Basoli did a great deal of scene-painting and production design for the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, endeavours which were recorded in two books published in 1810, and 1821. Basoli also published a treatise on domestic decor in 1827, and a volume of a hundred vedute of Bologna, in 1833. Beginning in 1803, he taught at the Accademia where he had studied, at length being appointed ‘Professor of Ornament’ there.

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Click on the images above to see them enlarged and in full. I have written about two other of the same series of books by Kiermeier-Debre and Vogel before, specifically those about Johann David Steingruber’s Architectonisches Alphabeth, and about the alphabets of the brothers De Bry.

The Genius of Salvator Rosa

In his etching The Genius of Salvator Rosa, part of which is shown in the detail immediately below, the artist is not merely boasting, as the modern definition of genius would imply. In the 17th century, genius was more often used to mean, simply, ‘characteristic disposition;’ in which light, this print, which Rosa made in about 1661, could be taken as a fairly straightforward (albeit encoded) depiction of his artistic personality: an allegorical self-portrait. This was a painter, however, who was not at all shy of vaunting his own particular ‘characteristic disposition’ in a way that, perhaps, helped nudge the concept of genius towards its present location. This etching is more concerned with publicity than with introspection, and serves as a kind of emblematic advertisement for its author’s work. In the picture, Rosa’s genius is the reclining youth, as careless of death (the background, where a tomb stands in a grove of cypresses) as he is of wealth (the overturned cornucopia under his hand).

Rosa’s genius reaches out toward the heart of a kneeling woman, the personification of Sincerity; while Liberty, likewise personified as in Ripa’s Iconologia stands behind him. Of the remaining figures, one obviously represents the art of painting, while the other two are more puzzling, and less iconographically conventional. They have been interpreted as figurations of, respectively, the Apollonian and Dionysiac tendencies in art, with the fellow in the toga representing the coolly rational, philosophical and equitable, and the androgynous satyr standing for the passionately inspired & irrational. Rosa’s headstrong attitude toward patronage and artistic independence is highlighted in the following etching, perhaps intended as a companion-piece to The Genius Of… It depicts an anecdote recounted by Pliny of Alexander the Great and his favourite painter, Apelles.

On his visits to the painter’s studio, the king was wont to discourse about art, about which subject, however, he was none too knowledgable. When Apelles pointed out that the boys who mixed his paints were laughing at their king’s ignorance, Alexander, such was his respect for Apelles, was stung into respectful silence. Rosa prized his independence, and insisted that as an artist he should follow only the dictates of his exalted imagination: an attitude that was singular in his day, but which proved to be prototypical for later generations of painters. While he was long typecast as a painter of the wildly imaginative and the savagely sublime, Rosa also considered himself as something of a philosopher, his outlook having been strongly influenced by his readings of ancient Stoicism and Cynicism. While he admired the Stoic ideals of self-control, fortitude and detatchment, his aspirations toward them were undermined by his passionate, volatile temperament.

Rosa felt an affinity with the figure of Diogenes the Cynic—a thinker that the Stoics esteemed for his self-sufficiency, independence, honesty, and intellectual courage, but whose un-Stoic tendencies to irascibility, stringency, harshness and satire also appealed to the painter, himself a notable author of satirical works. The etching above, Diogenes Casting Away his Bowl illustrates an incident from the account of the philosopher’s life by Diogenes Laertes. This etching, like Democritus in Meditation, the print shown below, reproduces an earlier painting of Rosa’s (both canvases now belonging to the collection of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The Democritus painting & print are unusual, in that, counter to pictorial convention, they show the ‘laughing philosopher’ in a mournful, melancholic attitude: ‘Democritus, the mocker of all things is here stopped by the ending of all things,’ explains the print’s caption.

Rosa produced well over a hundred etchings over the course of his career, many of which were widely circulated, and such was the demand for his work that they were often reprinted, copied, and pirated. His success lasted well beyond his lifetime, with the Rosa legend being perpetuated by eager admirers well into the 19th century. Although an accomplished printmaker, Rosa’s graphic style was, for the most part, unremarkably conventional, influenced here & there by predecessors and contemporaries such as de Ribera, Annibale Carracci, Castiglione, Stefano della Bella, and Pietro Testa. Besides the elaborate, large-format prints discussed here, he also produced an album of sixty-two etchings of small-scale figure-studies, collectively known as the figurine, which were his most popular and influential graphic works, but which, to my eye, are considerably less interesting than the later, larger, classically-inspired pieces.

The last of the present images, the Rescue of the Infant Oedipus, is thought to be one of Rosa’s last etchings, dating from ca. 1664. It features some particulalrly richly-detailed landscape-work, supposedly etched directly on to the plate, without the aid of preparatory drawings, and shows the unfortunate Oedipus hanging by his feet from a tree. I scanned this, and the other images from Richard W. Wallace’s The Etchings of Salvator Rosa, a catalogue raisonée published by the Princeton University Press in 1979. A good deal of what I have written above quotes or paraphrases Mr. Wallace’s text. This entry is for Loxias, who suggested in an e-mail back in February that I might like to write something about Rosa: sorry it took so long!

The Life of the Dead

The Life of the Dead (1933) is a collaboration between American poet Laura Riding Jackson and British painter John Aldridge. It is a product of the intense period when Riding and her partner Robert Graves were at the centre of a small community of expatriates in Deyá, Mallorca, busily writing and running their own Seizin Press.

The Life of the Dead, published by Arthur Baker in London in 200 copies, is an atypical work within both collaborators’ careers. The poem is preceded by an explanation which reveals some unusual facts about its creation:

The text of this highly artificial poem was first written in French, in order that the English might benefit from the limitations which French puts upon the poetic seriousness of words […]

I have used [French] here with approximate correctness, but my object was not to produce a finished literary exercise in French: the French text is merely the critical intermediary between the pictures and the English.

Riding describes the poem as the result of a “conscious relaxation of poetic energy”; a departure from the abstract, “truth-seeking” language of her serious poems, which prompted the accusations of obscurity that have always followed her. The Life of the Dead is full of decorative imagery and it is probably also allegorical, although not within any obvious symbolic tradition. For those who like that sort of thing, In Extremis, Deborah Baker’s biography of Riding, contains a long interpretation of the poem as “captur[ing] the mood of wicked play and brooding sexual intrigue that gripped Deyá life for [certain] members of Laura’s circle”.

The genesis of the prints is also atypical:

The illustrations are the germ of the text: I conceived them before the text, as verbal comedies. Their final form, however, was arrived at by a compromise between the illustrator and myself on the pictorial values of the subject […] (from the explanation)

From what little I could find in print and online, it would seem that Aldridge was a rather conservative landscape painter and designer (he was indeed a member of the Royal Academy). Thus, the echoes of roughly contemporary trends such as surrealism in the plates for The Life of the Dead are likely a result of Riding’s “art direction”. The medium of wood engraving seems to enhance the similarities with Max Ernst’s collage novels, which used commercial wood engravings as their raw material. Aldridge was not an engraver, so he sent the designs to one R. J. Beedham in London to have them executed in wood. When she learned that Beedham was “disturbed by the morbidity of the designs”, Riding wrote him,

Perhaps I can make them seem less terrible to you. They are not meant to be a record of a true motion of life […] exactly because they are a record of the life of the dead: meaning by “dead” the necessarily unrelieved repetition of living ways that take place in minds which, when they die, remain so to speak in their graves—go on being depressing little human individuals. As this is the way most human beings understand death, and so are destined to live death, it is rather important that there should be some record of it. I hope this explanation will not be even more depressing to you than the designs themselves.

The following excerpt may give you a flavour of the work, with its cycle of full page illustration, followed by French text, in turn followed by English text. For the full text, please see The Poems of Laura Riding, from Persea Books.

A l’intérieur de la ville: de jour

[…]

Les gaillards les plus étourdis sont les bravaches nouveaux-morts.
Ils vont brandissant leurs épées comme des soldats en congé
Qui soupirent vaillamment après la guerre.
Il n’y a rien de plus épatant, de plus exquis,
Dans tout ce répertoire de bizarreries lugubres
Que l’adresse du sabreur en train d’équilibrer
Un sujet difficile à la pointe de son épée.
Le grand feu de joie au beau milieu de la place
N’est pas un spectacle pour faire perdre votre temps;
Là on brûle les sujets les plus insignifiants.
Tout près, sur la colonne, on isole un à un
Les citoyens sans reproche, les êtres ennuyeux.
Souvent, un mois entier s’écoule, avant que le pieux
S’extasie du martyre, pour faire place au prochain.
Mais, à vrai dire, ce sont des niaiseries
Auxquelles ne s’intéressent guère les morts eux-mêmes—
Comme dans les journaux des pays étrangers
On ne trouve pas des traités sur les mœurs indigènes.

Within the City: Day-time

[…]

The most roguish galliards are the braves not long deceased.
They jaunt about, their swords unscabbarded, like soldiers home on leave
Valorously sighing for the battle-front.
There’s nothing quite so prodigious, so wanton-quaint
In this whole hypocondriacal repertory
As the intent skill of a swordsman juggling true
some difficult subject on his tidy sword-tip.
The great bonfire signalling the middle of the square
Is not a sight to claim much of your time.
One deals there only with the unimportant cases.
On the pillar not fare off are left marooned
Those tiresome neighbours without foibles—one at a time.
Often a whole month goes by before the righteous one
Transpires in martyrdom, to make room for the next.
But, come, these are indeed palling frivolities
In which the dead themselves take little interest—
As in the newspapers of foreign countries
Treatises on native modes do not abound.

Odds and Ends

I

News from those masters of the oblong tableau, Kahn & Selesnick: the book version of their Apollo Prophecies show is set for release next month; and they have launched a new website devoted to their work. Their current project EISBERGFREISTADT: is ‘inspired by an actual incident in 1923 when a mammoth iceberg ran aground in the Baltic port of Lübeck, towering over the town and terrifying the populace. Many decided (not unreasonably) that the ice caps were melting and the apocalypse coming. This event inspired gloomy cafe songs and penny dreadfuls, even a deck of playing cards…’ All being well, this intriguing project should premiere next spring at the Pepper Gallery in Boston.

II

In the summer of 2001, my wife and I spent a week’s vacation at a delightful finca in Andalucía, inland from Estepona, not far from the town of Casares. In the lounge there was an unusual picture, a framed group of six ceramic tiles, collectively depicting a group of colourful, stylised figures aboard a rowing-boat. I was curious enough about it to take a photograph of the picture, with the intention, after our return, of asking the owners of the finca where they had obtained it.

Instead, the photo was put away and forgotten, and it was only a few months ago that I rediscovered it in a dark corner of our spare room. Intrigued anew, I made a few inquiries about it, at length contacting the house’s owner, Mr. B________, who was kind enough to inform me that the picture was entitled Carnaval en Venecia, and was the work of an artist called Guillermo Silva Sanz de Santamaria, a ‘painter, sculptor, engraver, writer and Yoga teacher,’ who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, but now lives and works in Málaga.

III

Oddly enough, I had guessed there might be some kind of Latin American connection or influence behind the tile-picture, even though I am more than usually ignorant when it comes to the subject of Latin American art. I hope to make one small dent in this ignorance by way of a recently-published book I’m currently reading about the Argentine visionary Xul Solar (1887-1963), a ‘painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.’

IV

I’m also currently reading the second instalment of Javier Marías’s ‘novel in parts’ Your Face Tomorrow. It’s a novel, that, so far, I have found alternately fascinating and frustrating: the larger canvas of a multi-volume tale allows more room for Marías’s marvellous way with meticulous observation, subtle insight and parenthetical by-the-ways, but there is so much of these that the exceedingly circuitous narrative is weakened to the point that, for this impatient reader, it can at times seem like an indefinitely prolonged shaggy-dog story… One or two regulars here may remember an entry I wrote a couple of years ago concerning Marías, M.P. Shiel, and the story of the ‘Kings of Redonda.’ Anyone interested in this subject should read the long & very interesting comment recently left there by Roger Dobson, co-editor of the Lost Club Journal, concerning his quest to find the final resting-places of the Redondan ‘monarchs.’

V

In an e-mail a few days ago, Mr. Byrne wondered if Giornale readers might be interested in his new site, which sells reproductions of old-master prints by the likes of Dürer, Giulio Campagnola, Hans Baldung Grien, Goltzius, de Ribera and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione; and which includes a links page which serves as ‘a select critical guide to finding images of old Master prints on-line:’ a useful resource indeed.