Xul Solar

Xul Solar (1887-1963) was an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor; a visionary utopian; an occultist and astrologer who yet remained catholic; an accomplished musician who was fluent in seven languages, two of which were of his own devising; and a minor character in Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The following images are scans from the catalogue Xul Solar: Visiones y revelaciones, which was published in 2005 to coincide with a major exhibition of his work, staged in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City and Houston.

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Xul’s preferred medium was watercolour, although he also sometimes painted with tempera. Kandinsky and Marc’s Der Blaue Reiter almanac was a powerful early influence on his work, and his mature style is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Klee’s. ‘There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half man and half airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries’ (source)

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Xul was driven by a restless zeal for revision and reform: considering the Spanish language to be ‘several centuries out of date,’ and moreover, ‘a cacophonous language composed of words that were overly long,’ he developed Neo-Criollo (Neo-Creole), whose vocabulary was mostly drawn from Spanish and Portuguese, but which also incorporated elements of French, English, Greek and Sanskrit. He composed texts and even conversed in this invented tongue which, however, was continually changing, with each successive elaboration of it being different than the one before.

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The most important works in Neo-criollo are the San Signos (Holy Signs), a collection of sixty-four visionary texts based on the hexagrams of the I Ching. These texts were written at the request of Aleister Crowley, after a series of meetings between the two men in Paris in 1924. In a letter he wrote to Xul five years later, Crowley reminded him that ‘you owe me a complete set of visions for the 64 Yi symbols’ and added ‘your record as the best seer I ever tested still stands today.’ Although Xul had completed a first version of the San Signos by 1930, only a few short excerpts from them were ever published.

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In the ’40s, Xul devised a second, even more ambitious language-project: Pan-lengua, a proposed universal idiom with numeralogical and astrological underpinnings, utilising an invented script and a duodecimal number-system, whose entire lexicon could be expressed on the board of Panajedrez (Pan-chess), a game meant to be played on a 13x13 board, but which, according to Xul’s friend Jorge Luis Borges, was impossible to learn, owing to frequent and confusing amendments of its rules.

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Aside from language reform, Xul conceived architectural projects, proposed changes to musical notation, and rebuilt musical instruments after his own idiosyncratic design. His need to remake and ‘improve’ extended beyond the artistic & intellectual. ‘With ingenuity and a sense of humor, […] he proposed changes in football: “Why play with one only ball, and not with three or four, and divide the field into six or twelve parallel sectors, like in rugby, and that each player wear a shirt with different letters so that words and phrases are formed?”’

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Hard Stones and Rain Flower Pebbles

Pietre Dure (literally, ‘hard stones’), as previously mentioned here, is ‘the technique of using small, exquisitely cut and fitted, highly-polished coloured stones to create what amounts to a painting in stone.’ The first thirteen of the images below are details of scans from a book entitled Pietre Dure and the Art of Florentine Inlay by Annamaria Giusti (and translated from the Italian by Fabio Barry) published last year by Thames & Hudson. In the book, Giusti traces the antecedents of pietre dure work in the opus sectile floor and wall mosaics of classical Rome, in mediæval ‘Cosmatesque’ work, and in the intricate marble table-tops of Renaissance Rome, before examining the flowering of the technique proper in Medici Florence, Rudolfine Prague and elsewhere.

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From the time of the first Medici Grand Duke, Cosimo I., there had been a great appreciation and demand for this kind of decorative stonework in Florence, a demand that at first had to be met by recruiting suitably skilled craftsmen from elsewhere in Italy, and even from as far afield as Flanders. Cosimo also encouraged local production, which was further cultivated by his successors Francesco I. and Ferdinando I., with the latter duke establishing an official workshop, known as the Galleria dei Lavori, at the end of the 1580s, ‘which immediately acquired an international reputation […] for its refined hardstone creations.’ Ferdinando’s workshop survives even to the present day, in the form of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

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Several of the present images are in pairs: this is because many of the best reproductions in Giusti’s book fall across double-page spreads, and thus I was unable to scan them in full, so instead I scanned as large a portion of each facing page as I could. The first detail above shows part of a pietre dure panel based on a design by Baccio (or Bartolommeo) del Bianco (1604-1657), which could easily pass as one of Callot’s gobbi. The second shows the central portion of a tabletop completed by the grandducal workshop in 1604, after a design by Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627), a prolific painter, draughtsman and printmaker who was eventually appointed the Florentine workshop’s capomaestro.

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Ligozzi was also responsible for the design of the exquisite ‘table of strewn flowers,’ parts of which are highlighted in the first set of twinned details, above. This tabletop was assembled at the granducal workshop between 1614 and 1621, and is one of the most extravagant examples of the most typical Florentine pietre dure style, where brightly-coloured stones are set against a background of black marble. The next pair of images show two parts of a ‘tabletop with birds and landscape,’ another product of the Galleria dei Lavori, this time dating from the mid-17th century. The next brace of details shows an entirely different style, that typical of the Castrucci workshop in Prague, notable for its preponderance of green and red jaspers.

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The remainder of the images above belong to a later, post Medicean period, when Tuscany was ruled from Vienna by the Grand Duke (and later Emperor of Austria) Francis Stephen of Lorraine, during which time production at the Galleria dei Lavori came under the direction of the French goldsmith, Louis Siriès, who engaged the services of the Florentine artist Giuseppe Zocchi to design a spectacular series of pietre dure panels destined for the Habsburg court. The penultimate set of twinned details above show parts of a ‘View of the Port of Livorno,’ while following that are details from a vibrantly-coloured ‘Allegory of Water,’ and a close-up of part of a similarly vivid ‘Allegory of Air:’ all of which were based on studies painted by Zocchi.

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I first heard of ‘rain flower pebbles’ by way of a comment on my previous post about ‘pictorial stones.’ These pebbles, variously of crystal, agate, jasper and quartz, are thought to have been formed In the ancient Yangtze river some three million years ago, thereafter being deposited in the Nanjing region of China. They have been admired and collected for a millennium: some of them include patterns resembling skyscapes or landscapes, birds, beasts or human figures, such as Athanasius Kircher would have been delighted to possess. The last eight of the present images were scanned from a book entitled, simply Rain Flower Pebbles, published in 1990 in Hong Kong, by the Jiangsu People’s Publishing House.

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Della Bella

The images that follow are details from scans of etchings by the Florentine printmaker Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), as reproduced in the volume Stefano della Bella: Incisioni, edited by Anna Forlani Tempesti, and published by La Nuova Italia in Florence in 1972.

Della Bella was a prolific draftsman and etcher who succeeded Jacques Callot at the Medici grand-ducal court as a professional designer-printmaker. The roots of his graphic style lie in the calligraphic Mannerism of Callot, but during the course of his career Della Bella developed into an exuberant Baroque artist. His work remained influential for many decades and has been actively collected up to the present day. Della Bella was born into an artistic family; his father was a sculptor, and his three brothers all became artists.

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He became a protégé of the powerful Medici family and in 1633 was sent to Rome, where he lived in the Medici palace. There he developed his skills, making original drawings of public festivities, architecture, landscapes, and antique sculpture. In 1639 Della Bella was sent to Paris in the retinue of the Medici ambassador to the court of Louis XIII. There he remained until 1650, executing print commissions for Parisian publishers and for prominent patrons such as the Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. In 1650 Della Bella returned to Florence. (Source).

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Unlike most etchers of his time, who had careers as painters, della Bella devoted himself almost exclusively to printmaking, although he is also famed for the spirited drawings he made in preparation for his prints. Despite their higher degree of finish, his etchings retain much of the fluidity and dynamism of his drawings. […] Soldiers, beggars, satyr families, animals, gardens, ruins, splendid festivals, and scenes of everyday life are among the artist᾿s themes. (Source).

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Throughout his life, Della Bella drew in the open air, reporting on important events and places and rarely copying others' compositions. He made over a thousand prints and thousands of drawings. […] He etched subjects from the Bible and lives of the saints, portraits, and allegories. His genre scenes included images of animals, children, and exotic figures; and views of public life, rural scenes, marines, hunting, and military scenes. […] His ornamental prints included ornaments for theses, frontispieces, vignettes, drawing aids, games, and rebuses; his delicate asymmetries, sense of fantasy, and inventiveness prefigure the rococo of a century later. (Source).

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The present images are as follows: (i) two of a group of eight cards from a series designed in 1644 ‘intended for the instruction of the young Louis XIII’ (ii) a portrait of the commedia dell’arte actor Carlo Cantú, known as Buffet or Buffetto, who was renowned for his portrayal of Brighella; (iii) La Morte sul campo di battaglia (‘Death on the Battlefield’): one of a number of ‘Dance-of-Death’-themed designs by della Bella; (iv) A frontispiece for an edition of Les Oeuvres de Scarron where the poet is shown seated—his back turned to the viewer, so as to conceal his deformities—and surrounded by caricatures of the nine muses; (v) a view of Giambologna’s colossal statue of the god Apennino at Pratolino…

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…(vi) at first I supposed that this splendid ostrich was being portrayed as a natural-historical curiosity, not noticing the hounds pursuing close behind it, this etching being from a series entitled Le Cacce (‘The Hunts’); both (vii) and (viii) belong to a series of ‘Ornaments and Grotesques’ dating from about 1653; while (ix) and (x) are part of della Bella’s album of Vedute Romane (‘Roman Views’): the first depicting the grounds of the Villa Medici, and specifically the enormous antique marble vase that stood there, which is shown being sketched intently by the future Grand Duke Cosimo III; the second portraying the ruins of the Arch of Constantine.