Anatomy, Geometry

I happened upon an unexpected reference to a couple of the graphic works of Salvator Rosa I mentioned here a few entries ago in an essay by Benjamin A. Rifkin on The Art of Anatomy; part of an excellent book entitled Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today. In his discussion of William Cheselden’s 1733 treatise Osteographia, or The anatomy of the bones, Rifkin writes that the etching on its frontispiece (shown below), which ‘purports to show Galen contemplating a skeleton in the wilderness’ echoes ‘an etching by Rosa—Democritus in Meditation, which shows the philosopher studying scattered bones—with the figure of Galen an almost exact quotation from another Rosa etching, Diogenes Throwing Away the Cup.’

Elsewhere, Rifkin writes that ‘There is a history yet to be written on the influence of older anatomy books on the Romantic artists of the early nineteenth century:’ perceiving Gautier d’Agoty’s Anatomie generale… as an influence on Delacroix, and proposing that Géricault’s oil studies of cadaver-parts for his famous Raft of the Medusa recall ‘Lairesse’s drawings for Bidloo.’ We are also informed (without, in this case, any claim for its having exerted any æsthetic influence) that Samuel Taylor Coleridge owned a copy of Cheselden’s Osteographia. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book: it helped to flesh out the historical perspectives behind imagery I had formerly encountered in on-line presentations such as the (US) National Library of Medicine’s Historical Anatomies on the Web. From the opening page of Rifkin’s essay: ‘With kindred presumptions of benefice, the doctor studies the body to improve its fate; the artist to improve its spirit…’

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On quite another subject, I’m very grateful to Dr. Mueller’s recent comment on an old entry here about Lorenz Stoer’s remarkable 1567 opus, Geometria et Perspectiva. Evidently, this work was based on an even-more-remarkable manuscript, an electronic facsimile of which has recently been published by Harald Fischer Verlag. I took the present pair of images from a preview selection of sixteen pages from the manuscript at this publisher’s site.

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The Genius of Castiglione

As John Byrne noted on my recent entry about The Genius of Salvator Rosa, ‘Rosa’s “Genius” is partly a response to [Giovanni Benedetto] Castiglione’s “Genius of Castiglione” of about ten years earlier (they almost certainly knew each other). This is a less complex, but for me a more attractive work…’ I had discovered Castiglione’s etchings in the course of researching Rosa’s, and in so doing formed a similar preference for the former’s Genius over the latter’s. Il Genio di G.B. Castiglione, part of which is shown in the detail below, was first published in Rome, ca. 1648. The second etching illustrated below, La Melanconica (‘Melancholy’) is one of a number of other prints of Castiglione’s which are likewise thought to have influenced Rosa: specifically, in this case, the younger painter’s ‘Democritus in Meditation.’

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Castiglione was born in 1609, in Genoa. He is known to have studied, briefly, with the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Paggi, until Paggi’s death in 1627. Some (disputed) sources claim that Castiglione also studied with Anthony Van Dyck, who had spent a good deal of his Italian sojourn (1621-7) in Genoa: in any case, he would have had ample opportunity to examine the Flemish painter’s handiwork. Castiglione was unusual among the Italian artists of his day in absorbing northern-European influences. This was true, too, for his graphic work, where he was among the first Italians to attempt to emulate Rembrandt’s graphic style, as, for example, in the following pair of images (two of a series of four Grandi teste all’Orientale)…

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Castiglione travelled to Rome for the first time in 1632, by which time he had already won some renown as a painter, becoming a member of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca. From 1635, he spent some years in Naples, before returning to Genoa ca. 1639. He married there in 1641. The few canvases of Castiglione’s which survive from this period are, almost exclusively, devoted to religious subjects, but, meanwhile, his growing output of graphic work permitted him to explore classical and mythological as well as Biblical themes. He returned to Rome with his family in 1647, where he renewed contact with such notables as Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona, but left there again in 1651. In his later years, Castiglione is known to have spent time in Genoa, Venice & Parma, and in Mantua, at the court of Carlo III. Gonzaga, where he died in 1664.

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Castiglione was as famous a painter as an etcher in his day, but this fame has faded with the fugitive blues and greens on many of his canvases, leaving no few of them with drably brown landscapes, and ashen skies. He was a versatile painter, but had a particular talent for animal-painting, and he seems to have sought out subjects which allowed him to bring animals into his compositions. Castiglione was also an innovator, apparently inventing the monotype technique, and probably being the first to create a soft-ground etching. The following image may (or may not) be a self-portrait of the artist: it has unhelpfully been described as ‘Portrait of a man in a plumed cap (self-portrait, or portrait of G. L. Bernini)…’

My source for these images is a book entitled Il Genio di G. B. Castiglione, Il Grechetto which was published by SAGEP Editrice in Genoa in 1990, Il Grechetto being a nickname by which the artist is better-known in Italy. Click on the details above to see the images enlarged and in full. Many more of Castiglione’s etchings can be found here, and a few more here (three etchings), here & here.

Griemiller’s Rosary

In 1578, Jaroš Griemiller of Třebsko completed an illustrated manuscript containing the first translation into Czech of an alchemical text known as the Rosarium Philosophorum (‘The Rosary of the Philosophers’). This document is the sole known record of Griemiller’s life, although a Pavel Griemiller (d. 1593, also ‘of Třebsko,’ and presumably a close relative of Jaroš) is known to have been a practising alchemist, who meanwhile held an official position as a county assayer. The manuscript was dedicated to Vilém z Rožmberka (or, Wilhelm von Rosenberg: 1535-1592), a nobleman & diplomat who was also a ‘great benefactor of alchemical research.’ The unusually high quality of the illustrations in the manuscript suggest that either Griemiller was an accomplished artist, or else that he was assisted by a painter employed in the Rožmberk court.

The Rosarium Philosophorum was first printed in Frankfurt in 1550, where it formed the second part of a collection of alchemical treatises entitled De Alchimia. This edition was illustrated by a series of twenty woodcuts, which had presumably been copied from an earlier manuscript. The origin of the Rosarium is obscure, but quite likely extends back into the 15th Century. The work is one of several that was long associated with the name of the 13th-Century physician, pharmacist, and alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova, but this is an attribution ‘of very doubtful authenticity.’

The text of the Rosarium is divided into sections associated with these twenty illustrations. These sections introduce ideas arising from the symbolic content of the woodcuts, and weave these remarks in with quotations from various well known alchemical authorities, often using quite lengthy extracts from other alchemical writers. So the Rosarium is a gathering of material within a certain framework, rather than being an entirely original textual statement of alchemical ideas.

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The text of the Rosarium is quite peculiar in that it seems almost to move in and out of focus. At one point in a section one seems to have a clear precisely drawn idea, which as it is developed in the text becomes more unfocused, more diffuse, and one finds oneself unclear as to what level the text then refers. Then, just as one’s puzzlement is growing into irritation, the text moves sharply back into focus with another clear statement of an idea. This may be a quite conscious technique on the part of the anonymous writers rather than just a failing of the translation. At any rate, the text constantly shifts between physical alchemy, statements about experiments with substance, and the realm of soul alchemy, the task of the inner transmutation of forces within man’s soul. In that it sought to unite these two alchemical realms, the Rosarium set a style for alchemical literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which the physical process became a mirror for soul development, and the inner content of soul experiences became projected upon outer processes in the laboratory or the natural world—Adam McLean.

The quality of Griemillar’s manuscript has been taken as evidence of there having been a high standard of alchemical knowledge in Bohemia even prior to the arrival of the Rudolfine court there in 1583. One of the leading figures in Bohemian alchemy at that time was one Bavor Rodovský of Husitřany (1526-1592?), who ‘inherited his first name from his grandfather Bavor the Senior, who was believed to be a wizard and could supposedly produce gold.’ Alas, he cannot have produced much, as ‘his family wasn’t even wealthy enough for the native manor to provide sustenance for his five descendants, Bavor Junior being one of them.’ Bavor jr. ‘devoted himself to alchemy, astronomy, and mathematics, but was also interested in history and philosophy,’ and was apparently as keen a practioner of the culinary as the spagyric arts, as evinced by a collection of forty recipes he compiled. Rodovský, it has been recorded, was a friend of Pavel Griemiller’s.

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The illustrations in Griemiller’s Rosarium differ from those in the 1550 Frankfurt edition: he omitted some designs containing overtly Christian symbolism, and added a few more pictures of his own, some of which appear to have been of his own devising, while others were inspired by the arrestingly strange imagery in another alchemical opus, the Aurora Consurgens (‘Rising Dawn), most notably the pair of promiscuously symbolic images at the end of the manuscript. Of the exceedingly complex, and, to my eyes, rather ugly penultimate image, we read that ‘the meanings hidden in this illustration are so numerous that an extensive treatise could be written about them… [it] is a very comprehensive symbol of the alchemical work’s basic agent, which alternately kills the materium of the great work and brings it back to life. The illustration is also a mnemonic aid, from which a number of important, quite practical findings may be deduced, referring to the strictly-defined prerequisites for work on the Philosophical Stone.’

My source for the images above (click on them, by the way, to see them enlarged and in full), is a book entitled Opus Magnum (‘The Book of Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, Magic, Astrology, the Kabbala, and Secret Societies in Bohemia,’ previously mentioned here), published under the Trigon imprint in Prague, 1997. More specifically, the images, and a good deal of the information above, are drawn from an essay therein by Ivo Purš, entitled ‘The “Rosarium Philosophorum” of Jaroš Griemiller of Třebsko’ Some of the same images can be seen in smaller-format on this French page about the Aurora Consurgens. See also this recent-ish entry at Bibliodyssey, featuring images from a different manuscript copy of the Rosarium Philosophorum.