Free Book Giveaway #10

Too many books! Not enough room! What better reason could there be to stage the tenth of the Giornale Nuovo’s free book giveaways? Peruse the odd assortment 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. Lequeu: an Architectural Enigma, by Phillipe Duboy, translated from the French by Francis Scarfe, with a foreword by Robin Middleton. The book contains 420 illustrations, of which only 8, alas, are in colour. I disparaged this book in my post about Lequeu: ‘while Duboy does not omit […] what little is known about Lequeu’s life, he does this confusingly, and uses his discussion of Lequeu’s work as a pretext for a tiresome & pretentious farrago about Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel & Le Corbusier, among others.’ This is a dustjacketed hardback: ISBN: 0-500-34095-1; 368pp.

2. Ceramica de Picasso, by Georges Ramié. Most of Picasso’s paintings fall into an aesthetic blind-spot of mine, but I do admire some of his sculptures, and, as documented in this volume, which I picked up at the bookshop of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, his ceramics. The catalogue is illustrated in colour throughout; the text is in Spanish. My copy is a hardcover issued by Ediciones Polígrafa in 1995. ISBN: 84-343-0399-X; 128pp.

 

3. Jean Pierre Velly: L’Oeuvre Gravé collects the etchings and engravings of this Breton artist, in a catalogue raisonné compiled by Didier Bodart, with a preface by Mario Praz. I confess I never took to these works like I did to Velly’s paintings (previously mentioned here & here), although Velly was, for much of his career, best known as a graphic artist. This catalogue was issued in 1980 by the Galleria Don Chisciotte in Rome, in conjunction with Sigfrido Amadeo and Vanni Scheiwiller in Milan. It is also available for download in PDF format from this page. The text is in French and Italian. There is no ISBN, & the book is not paginated, but runs to approx. 164pp.

4. The Philosophical Writings of Henry More presents us with excerpts from three of the Cambridge Platonist’s works, namely ‘The Antidote Against Atheism,’ ‘The Immortality of the Soul,’ and ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum.’ with a long introduction and extensive commentary & notes by Flora Isabel MacKinnon. Personally, I would have preferred much longer extracts & less commentary. This volume is a 1970s reprint of an edition first issued in 1925. ISBN 0-404-04409-3; ca. 312pp.

 

5. Volume XIX of the Warburg Institute’s Surveys and Texts is Philosophical Fictions and the French Renaissance, a collection of eight essays, edited, and with an introduction by Neil Kenny, and with an afterword by Terence Cave. Three of the scholarly texts therein are in French, the others in English. The subjects include Bartélemy Aneau’s Alector; ‘Neoplatonic Fictions in the Hymnes of Ronsard;’ ‘The Philosophical Phoenix’ and ‘Fictions cosmographiques à la Renaissance.’ ISBN: 0-85481-079-X; 138pp (paperback).

6. Mélancolies: Livre d'Images, was my main source for this post. It’s a ‘book of images,’ published to coincide with the exhibition Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident staged in Paris in ’05-’06, and was compiled by Maxime Préaud, a knowledgeable authority on graphic art. The book’s historical scope extends from Dürer, in particular his famous 1514 print Melencolia I, to Goya. The text is in French. The illustrations (all in black-and-white) are well-chosen and well-reproduced, although, presumably owing to the book’s small size and square format, several of them appear to be more-or-less cropped. Paperback; ISBN: 2-252-03535-8; 224pp.

 

7. Barocke Architektur in Böhmen, is the ninth volume in the excellent Instrumentaria Artium series issued by the Austrian publishers Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt (ADEVA for short). It reproduces in facsimile an architectural treatise by a master-builder named Abraham Leüthner, which was first published in Prague in 1677. Leüthner’s book begins with a short, illustrated text, and is thereafter wholly pictorial: a jumble of groundplans, façades, decorative elements, fountains, grotesques, diagrams, etc. (I used a few of these images in this post). It is followed by an illustrated 40pp+ essay (in German) by H.G. Franz. Paperback; ISBN: 3-201-01577-6; 140pp.

8. Francisek Starowieyski: Plakaty. Retrospekywa / Posters. Retrospective. This slim volume collects the striking poster designs of Starowieyski (some of which I mentioned here). The images are drawn 'from the collection of Piotra Dabrowskiego & Agnieski Kulon.' There is a brief foreword by Starowieyski, and a note by Piotr Dabrowski (both given in Polish and English), followed by reproductions of sixty or so of his designs, followed by a more comprehensive catalogue, with tiny thumbnail illustrations (all in colour). Paperback; ISBN: 83-915298-5-1; approx. 96pp.

 

9. Eisbergfreistadt: A House of Cards, by by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. As recently mentioned here, this booklet contains designs for ‘a hand-coloured etched playing card deck’ with ‘four suits: birds, smokestacks, icebergs,’ which, together ‘form a continuous panorama.’ I’m letting this go as I now have some decks of the actual cards that Kahn & Selesnick have since produced. Paperback; 57pp; published by lulu.com; no ISBN.

10. Die Entdeckung Amerikas, (‘The Discovery of America’) by Saul Steinberg. This is the German-language edition, published by Diogenes Verlag, Zürich, of a collection of Steiberg’s drawings published in 1992. I wrote about this book here: while I enjoyed making these works’ acquaintance, I have seldom looked at them since. There is a brief introduction by Arthur C. Danto (given in German), but after that the pictures are presented without commentary. Hardback; ISBN: 3-257-02042-2; 210pp.

Marc Dennis

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from Marc Dennis, thanking me for some old Giornale posts which, he wrote, had aided him in his research for a lecture on the subject of Insects in Art that he had delivered for the New York Entomological Society. Mr. Dennis added that I might be interested in certain of his paintings, and, after a quick perusal of the works on display at his website, I replied that yes, indeed I was.

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His compositions are usually simple yet bold examples of beautifully-rendered realism, though seldom without some ironic twist. In the first of the two beguiling seascapes above, for example, the swell in the foreground of the picture is explained by the painting’s title: Seascape with Submarine. The columns of spray in the second image? Seascape with Machine Gunfire. ‘Rather than trashing art history,’ writes one critic, ‘Marc Dennis uses it to make contemporary social commentary.’

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Through the appropriation of a visually decadent style of historical painting, I attempt at infusing the notions of beauty and seduction with new symbolic criteria and attitude.

With a light-handed use of narrative and metaphor, I’d like to think that my style of realism, in its lucid objectivity, results in a kind of nervous beauty and irrational disquiet.

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Dennis has been exhibiting his work since the early ’90s, and his paintings have been on show at such prestigious locales as The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He is currently represented by the Hirschl and Adler Gallery in New York. He also works as an Asssociate Professor of Art at Elmira College in upstate New York.

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The first four of the images above were scanned from a catalogue of a 2003 exhibition devoted to Dennis’s paintings at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, also in New York, while the remainder of them were sent to me by the artist. Other paintings of his can be found at the websites of the Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Houston; the Bettcher Gallery, Miami; the Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee and the G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle. All of these images are copyright © Marc Dennis, and are reproduced here with permission.

Tales of the Arabesque

Not quite a year ago, further to a post here about the grotesque in art, Marly asked if I might also write something similar about the arabesque. This idea rested on a cold back-burner until a couple of weeks ago, when I acquired a booklet entitled Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 to 1750 by Peter Ward-Jackson, in which are reprinted some articles that had first been published in a 1967 issue of The Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin. One of these articles was specifically concerned with the arabesque, and is my source for the images (and for most of the information) below.

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The very term arabesque is a rather diffuse one, sometimes used broadly to denote almost any style of geometric ornamentation prevalent in Islamic nations, but here I will take it as referring more specifically to stylised vegetal decoration ‘in which plants and leaves grow according to the laws of geometry rather than nature,’ forming ‘interlaced straps, zizags, spirals, scrolls and knots’ which tend to fall into complicated polygonal shapes, in turn forming separate frames for other patterns inside them. Use of this type of decoration, which apparently originated in 10th-Century Baghdad, became widespread throughout the Islamic world in the following centuries.

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While stylised, interlaced ornament was not unknown in classical and mediæval Europe, the arabesque proper seems to have made a relatively sudden appearance in Renaissance Italy ca. 1530, with Venice as its likely point of entry. ‘Venice was a great market for Islamic wares, some of which were made in Venice itself by the Moslem community that lived there.’ The first image above shows part of a damascened brass vessel thought to have been made by a Venetian Moslem craftsman in the early 16th Century. Similar patterns, known even then as Arabesque, (or Moresque, or Saracenic) were used in the decoration of book-bindings, manuscripts, textiles and pottery.

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‘This then,’ writes Ward-Jackson, ‘was the Saracenic ornament which certain Italian artists began to study and to copy during the 1530s, precisely in the decade when a new kind of scrollwork […] was beginning to emerge in the palace of Fontainebleau under the direction of Rosso Fiorentino.’ ‘It so happens,’ he continues ‘that the author of one of the first books of Moresque ornaments to be published in Europe, the Italian artist Francesco Pellegrini, was one of Rosso's assistants in the work of decorating the Palace.’ Ward-Jackson then speculates that Pellegrini ‘may have introduced Rosso to the Moresque, and Rosso’s knowledge of this free linear ornament may have encouraged him in his own experiments with bands and scrolls, [although] the Saracenic influence is not very perceptible in Rosso’s own work.’

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This novel style was quickly circulated throughout Europe by means of pattern-books illustrating arabesques on needlework, jewellery, furniture, weaponry, etc., etc. The designs reproduced in Pellegrini’s volume (fig. 2), were intended for embroiderers. Some similar patterns were printed without a specific decorative context, such as the mid-16th-Century designs by the engraver Jean Gourmont (figs. 3 & 4). Others were shown in situ as embellishments on finished objects, such as the decoration on the cup designed by Hans Holbein the Younger shown above (fig. 5) in a later print by Wenceslas Hollar, or the pattern on the ‘pilgrim bottle’ (fig. 6), designed by the Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer.

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By the mid-17th Century, the vogue for ‘pure’ arabesque had faded—Pierre Firens’s design for a dish (fig. 7) being a relatively late example. Arabesques, though seldom used any more in isolation, came to be an essential part of the design vocabulary of the 18th-Century rococo style, having been proved ‘capable of combining harmoniously with traditional classical motifs, above all with the grotesque.’ Even in the 16th Century, some designers had begun to combine grotesque and arabesque elements together: the patterns by Balthasar Sylvius in fig. 8, above, are an example. The ewer by Georg Wechter shown in fig. 9 is another hybrid design, where Fontainebleau-style strapwork is interlaced in an arabesque-like manner.

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The design by Lucas Kilian (fig. 10) foreshadows the rococo deployment of grotesque elements following vaguely arabesque patterns around a central frame. The next image (by Jean Berain, fig. 11) is another example of what is, ostensibly, a grotesque, but again, one in which the ‘movement of the lines, the ogival patterns which they form when intersecting, and above all, the tendency of the bands to fall into polygonal patterns within the design’ we see ‘features typical of the arabesque.’ The final image above, a mid-18th Century ceiling design by François de Cuviliés the Elder seems no less distant from the the origins of the arabesque, but even so (according to Ward-Jackson) ‘the same basic features are still there: the lines of bandwork, alternately straight and scrolled, the acanthus foliage sprouting from them at intervals, the complex interlacements, and the tendency of the lines to form separate polygonal compartments.’