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gulliver-s-travels-1939

Gulliver’s Travels (1939) Jan 22, 2012 1939 cel-animated Technicolor feature film directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios, based upon the Lilliputian adventures of Gulliver as depicted in Jonathan Swift's 18th century novel. Produced as an answer to the success of Walt Disney's box-office hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs of 1937, Gulliver was only the second cel-animated feature film ever released, and the first produced by an American studio other than Walt Disney Productions.

public-domain-review

Jan 22, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:54.097919

santa-claus-proves-there-is-a-santa-claus-1925

Santa Claus Proves There is a Santa Claus (1925) Dec 23, 2011 Santa Claus Proves There is a Santa Claus (with song "Christmas Comes But Once a Year") by Ernest Hare (1925). Hare's recording career began when he became Al Jolson's understudy in the Broadway musical Sinbad during 1919-20. He went onto record with the Cleartone Four, the Crescent Trio, the Harmonizers Quartet, and the Premier Quartet. He made a series recordings with Al Bernard in the late 1910s and the start of the 1920s. After he met Billy Jones in 1919, they went on to do numerous recordings together for Brunswick, Edison and most other major U.S. record companies of the era. They gained fame as "The Happiness Boys" and by 1928 they were the highest-paid singers in radio earning $1,250 a week.

public-domain-review

Dec 23, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:54.615216

the-night-before-christmas-1905

The Night Before Christmas (1905) Dec 24, 2011 1905 version directed by Edwin S. Porter of the poem first published anonymously in 1823 and generally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. Porter's version is the very first film adaptation of the famous tale. Musical accompaniment added later, made up mostly of old cylinder recordings from the same studio and period. (For silent version see here).

public-domain-review

Dec 24, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:55.083296

james-joyce-s-chamber-music-1918-american-edition

James Joyce’s Chamber Music (1918 American Edition) Feb 3, 2012 Collection of love poems by James Joyce, originally published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907, the same year he refused Joyce's manuscript for Dubliners. Composed and revised between 1901 and 1906, the bulk of them were written for an imagined love, before he first 'stepped out' with his wife to be Nora in 16 June 1904. The title "Chamber Music" was reportedly a pun relating to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, though this seems to be a later embellishment by Joyce of the title's meaning. ※※Indexed under…Urinepun for James Joyce’s poetic tinklings Joyce to Stannie, Feb 1907: I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man's book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope someone will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like. Besides they are not pretentious and have a certain grace. I will keep a copy myself and (so far as I can remember) at the top of each page I will put an address, or a street so that when I open the book I can revisit the places where I wrote the different songs. Joyce to Stannie, 11 Feb 1907: I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary... Joyce to Stannie, April 1907, debating cancelling the book: All that kind of thing is false... (Ellmann's paraphrase: ...insincerity and fakery... an ironic note to make them modern... essentially poems for lovers and he was no lover). Joyce to Nora, 21 Aug 1909: I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like 'Gentle lady' or 'Thou leanest to the shell of night'. But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire. In Nov 1909 Joyce had an elaborate handwritten copy bound as a Christmas present for Nora including this comment: Perhaps this book I send you now will outlive both you and me. Perhaps the fingers of some young man or young girl (our children's children) may turn over its parchment leaves reverently when the two lovers whose initials are interlaced on the cover have long vanished from the earth. Nothing will remain then, dearest, of our poor human passion-driven bodies and who can say where the souls that looked on each other through their eyes will then be. I would pray that my soul be scattered in the wind if God would but let me blow softly for ever about one strange lonely dark-blue rain-drenched flower in a wild hedge at Aughrim or Oranmore. Joyce to Gorman, 1931: I wrote Chamber Music as a protest against myself.

public-domain-review

Feb 3, 2012

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a-catalogue-of-polish-bishops

A Catalogue of Polish Bishops Jan 12, 2012 The Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium Vitae episcoporum Cracoviensium (Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno and Lives of the Bishops of Cracow) by Jan Długosz is a 16th century manuscript illuminated by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik between 1531-1535. Today it resides in the collection of the National Library in Warsaw.

public-domain-review

Jan 12, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:56.013925

mythical-monsters-1886

Mythical Monsters (1886) Jan 14, 2012 An exploration into all beasts fabled, fabricated, fantastical, and fanciful, from across the world, including the Chinese and Japanese dragon, unicorn, phoenix, and the spate of sea serpents sighted off the nineteenth-century New England coast.

public-domain-review

Jan 14, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:56.645144

madame-tussaud-s-napoleon-relics-pictures-and-other-curiosities-1901

Madame Tussaud’s Napoleon Relics, Pictures and Other Curiosities (1901) Jan 23, 2012 Madame Tussaud's 1901 Catalogue of Napoleon Relics, Pictures and Other Works of Art and Curiosities. Although famous for her wax work models, the Madame Tussaud's exhibition also featured a weird and wonderful array of historical memorabilia, including: a scrap of the cravat Charles I wore on the morning of his execution; the shrunken head of a South American chief; the oriental costume of Richard Burton; and an incredible medley of Napoleonic relics including numerous carriages, a lock of his hair, the bedsheets of his death bed, and a strip of the willow tree under which he used to sit and was eventually buried when in exile.

public-domain-review

Jan 23, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:57.093857

presidents-and-turkeys

Presidents and Turkeys Nov 24, 2011 Happy Thanksgiving! The pictures below are from the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, a ceremony that takes place at the White House every year at which The President of the United States is presented with a live turkey, usually of the Broad Breasted White variety. Since 1989, the first Thanksgiving of President George H. W. Bush, it has been official policy for the president to grant the turkey a "presidential pardon" and thus spare the bird from ending up on the dining table. On Nov. 19, 1963, just days before his assassination, John F Kennedy spontaneously spared a turkey but did not grant an official "pardon".

public-domain-review

Nov 24, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:57.553745

the-enchanted-drawing-1900

The Enchanted Drawing (1900) Nov 30, 2011 From Edison films catalog: "Upon a large sheet of white paper a cartoonist is seen at work rapidly sketching the portrait of an elderly gentleman of most comical feature and expression. After completing the likeness the artist rapidly draws on the paper a clever sketch of a bottle of wine and a goblet, and then, to the surprise of all, actually removes them from the paper on which they were drawn and pours actual wine out of the bottle into a real glass. Surprising effects quickly follow after this; and the numerous changes of expression which flit over the face in the sketch cause a vast amount of amusement and at the same time give a splendid illustration of the caricaturist's art." Musical accompaniment by Philip Carli.

public-domain-review

Nov 30, 2011

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the-embalming-jars-of-frederik-ruysch

The Embalming Jars of Frederik Ruysch Jan 24, 2012 Frederic Ruysch (1638-1731) was a Dutch botanist and anatomist, remembered mainly for his groundbreaking methods of anatomical preservation and the creation of his carefully arranged scenes incorporating human body parts. These remarkable 'still life' displays blurred the boundary between the demonstrative element of scientific preservation and the symbolic and allegorical of vanitas art. As well as his larger more elaborate anatomical displays (as seen above) he would also keep his specimens of limbs, fetuses and the carcasses of small animals carefully embalmed in individual glass jars. Offsetting the macabre contents he would create 'flowering' lids, decorating them with beads, fishes, shells, artificial flowers and lacy garments - the little scenes often echoing the life the jar's contents had once known. The images below are extracted from Ruysch's Thesaurus animalium primus (1710).

public-domain-review

Jan 24, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:58.554349

time-lapse-demolition-of-the-star-theatre-new-york-1902

Time-Lapse Demolition of the Star Theatre, New York (1902) Jan 29, 2012 Time-lapse shot of the demolition of the Star Theatre in New York City, one brick at a time. Produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and preserved by the Library of Congress.

public-domain-review

Jan 29, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:58.962812

the-voice-of-florence-nightingale

The Voice of Florence Nightingale Dec 13, 2011 The recording was made on 30th July 1890 to raise money for the impoverished veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade. The full transcript of the recording says: 'When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale.' In fact, there are two recitations; this second one having slightly altered wording to the first, which was presumably a practice session.

public-domain-review

Dec 13, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:59.438148

labors-of-the-months-from-the-tres-riches-heures

Labors of the Months from the Très Riches Heures Feb 8, 2012 The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (or simply the Très Riches Heures) is probably the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century, "le roi des manuscrits enluminés" ("the king of illuminated manuscripts"). It is a very richly decorated Book of Hours containing over 200 folios, of which about half are full page illustrations. It was painted sometime between 1412 and 1416 by the Limbourg brothers for their patron Jean, Duc de Berry. They left it unfinished at their (and the Duc's) death in 1416. Charles I, Duc de Savoie commissioned Jean Colombe to finish the paintings between 1485-1489. Featured here are the Labors of the Months, the section illustrating the various activities undertaken by the Duke's court and his peasants according to the month of the year. Most of the illustrations show one of the Duke's castles in the background, and each are accompanied by a sun carrying Phoebus beneath an archway depicting the appropriate zodiac signs. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Feb 8, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:39:59.900528

whitney-brothers-quartet-the-little-red-drum-1908

Whitney Brothers Quartet - The Little Red Drum (1908) Jan 19, 2012 1908 song from the Whitney Brothers Quartet, putting to music "The Drum", a poem by Eugene Field about children playing a game of "Cowboys and Indians". I’m a beautiful red, red drum,And I train with the soldier boys;As up the street we come,Wonderful is our noise!There’s Tom, and Jim, and Phil,And Dick, and Nat, and Fred,While Widow Cutler’s BillAnd I march on ahead,With a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd a tum-titty-um-tum-tum—Oh, there’s bushels of fun in thatFor boys with a little red drum! The Injuns came last nightWhile the soldiers were abed,And they gobbled a Chinese kiteAnd off to the woods they fled!The woods are the cherry-treesDown in the orchard lot,And the soldiers are marching to seizeThe booty the Injuns got.With tum-titty-um-tum-tum,And r-r-rat-tat-tat,When soldiers marching comeInjuns had better scat! Step up there, little Fred,And, Charley, have a mind!Jim is as far aheadAs you two are behind!Ready with gun and swordYour valorous work to do—Yonder the Injun hordeAre lying in wait for you.And their hearts go pitapatWhen they hear the soldiers comeWith a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd a tum-titty-um-tum-tum! Course it’s all in play!The skulking Injun crewThat hustled the kite awayAre little white boys, like you!But “honest” or “just in fun,”It is all the same to me;And, when the battle is won,Home once again march weWith a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd tum-titty-um-tum-tum;And there’s glory enough in thatFor the boys with their little red drum!

public-domain-review

Jan 19, 2012

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little-lord-fauntleroy-1936

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) Dec 4, 2011 Considered by many to be the best film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 novel of the same name, said by Polly Hovarth to be "the Harry Potter of his time"- starring Freddie Bartholomew, Dolores Costello, and C. Aubrey Smith. A nine-year-old Brooklyn boy living in poverty, moves to England to live with an aristocratic grandfather he's never known after he is told he's heir to a British earldom.

public-domain-review

Dec 4, 2011

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harry-clarke-s-illustrations-for-poe-s-tales-of-mystery-and-imagination-1919

Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919) Text by Ned Pennant-Rea Jan 19, 2012 Since Edgar Allan Poe’s stories of suspense and horror were first compiled as Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1902, many gifted artists have tried their hand at illustrating them, notably Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Gustave Dore. But perhaps it is the Irishman Harry Clarke who has come closest to evoking the delirious claustrophobia and frightening inventiveness of “Poe-land”. For the 1919 edition of Tales Clarke created the twenty-four monochrome images featured below. Their nightmarish, hallucinatory quality makes you wonder if he was on something, until you remember the stories. A new iteration with eight colour plates was published in 1923. Calla Editions recently reprinted this second edition and gave it a sane price tag. You can learn more about the under-appreciated stained glass artist behind the mesmeric illustrations in our essay “Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass” by Kelly Sullivan.

public-domain-review

Jan 19, 2012

Ned Pennant-Rea

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stella-maris-1918

Stella Maris (1918) Dec 4, 2011 A 1918 silent film staring Mary Pickford, directed by Marshall Neilan, written by Frances Marion and based on William J. Locke's novel. Stella Maris, a beautiful, crippled girl, who is cared for by a rich family, and the orphan Unity Blake, fall in love with same man, John, who is still married to (though separated from) a cruel wife.

public-domain-review

Dec 4, 2011

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pirates-1922

Pirates (1922) Aug 30, 2011 Published in 1922, based on the writings of Captain Charles Johnson from 1735, with additional foreword and illustrations from C.Lovat Fraser.

public-domain-review

Aug 30, 2011

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giambattista-della-porta-s-de-humana-physiognomonia-libri-iiii-1586

Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomonia libri IIII (1586) Aug 30, 2011 Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), also known as Giovanni Battista Della Porta and John Baptist Porta, was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution and Reformation. These are pages from his book on physiognomy De humana physiognomonia libri IIII.

public-domain-review

Aug 30, 2011

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suddenly-1954

Suddenly (1954) Sep 17, 2011 Frank Sinatra stars as John Baron, a psychopathic killer, who along with two other men, has been hired to assassinate the President, and holds a family hostage while waiting for his target. It was long thought that Lee Harvey Oswald actually saw Suddenly on television in October 1963 (one month before the assassination of Kennedy), but an investigation of the claim eventually proved it to be untrue.

public-domain-review

Sep 17, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:03.725528

faust-1926

Faust (1926) Aug 26, 2011 F.W. Murnau's telling of the classic German legend, starring Gösta Ekman as Faust, Emil Jannings as Mephisto, Camilla Horn as Gretchen/Marguerite, Frida Richard as her mother, Wilhelm Dieterle as her brother and Yvette Guilbert as Marthe Schwerdtlein, her aunt. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic version. Considered by many to be his best film, outshining even his more well known "Nostferatu". Download from Internet Archive Note this film is in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.

public-domain-review

Aug 26, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:04.219657

the-mechanism-of-human-physiognomy

The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy Aug 19, 2011 Plates from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne's 'Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine', published by Jules Renouard, Paris, in 1862. By applying electrodes to male and female volunteers, Duchenne was able to activate individual muscles in the face. He saw the human face as a map, the features of which could be codified into universal taxonomies of inner states, with each muscle representing a 'movement of the soul'. He listed 53 emotions that could be classified in terms of muscular action.

public-domain-review

Aug 19, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:04.669650

intolerance-1916

Intolerance (1916) Sep 4, 2011 Director D.W. Griffith is perhaps most know for his groundbreaking but controversial film Birth of Nations (1915), but his follow up Intolerance (1916) (which can be seen perhaps partly as a response to accusations of perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Klu Klux Klan in Birth of Nations) is considered by many to be his masterpiece, and indeed the greatest film of the whole silent era. Griffiths mammoth film, also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages.", consists of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrated mankind's intolerance during four different ages in world history. Intolerance was a colossal undertaking filled with monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras.

public-domain-review

Sep 4, 2011

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scarlet-street-1945

Scarlet Street (1945) Aug 21, 2011 Widely regarded as one of Fritz Lang's best films, Scarlet Street is based on the French novel La Chienne (The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière. Somewhere between film noir and black comedy, the plot revolves around a man in mid-life crisis who befriends a young woman whose fiancé persuades her to con him out of some of the fortune she thinks he has.

public-domain-review

Aug 21, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:05.603741

horse-laughs-1891

Horse Laughs (1891) Sep 13, 2011 Remarkably strange little book on account of much of the humour being lost over the passage of time - often resulting in surreal, if not somewhat disconcerting, little scenes.

public-domain-review

Sep 13, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:06.076544

the-last-american-1889

The Last American (1889) Aug 19, 2011 Short future history novel from John Ames Mitchell (1845–1918). First published in 1889, it is the fictional journal of Persian admiral Khan-Li, who in the year 2951 rediscovers North America by sailing across the Atlantic.

public-domain-review

Aug 19, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:06.487974

antony-s-address-over-the-body-of-caesar-1914

Antony’s Address Over The Body of Caesar (1914) Aug 26, 2011 Marc Antony's famous speech from William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Julius Caesar, performed by Harry E. Humphrey in 1914.

public-domain-review

Aug 26, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:07.044966

never-weaken-1921

Never Weaken (1921) Sep 4, 2011 American comedian Harold Lloyd's last short film before he moved permanently into feature-length production. It is one of his trademark "thrill" comedies, featuring him dangling from a tall building, `a technique which he was to perfect two years later in his classic Saftey First! from 1923. The plot revolves around his attempts to commit suicide after he finds out the woman he loves will marry another. Available also with an added soundtrack here.

public-domain-review

Sep 4, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:07.492386

the-lodger-a-story-of-the-london-fog-1927

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) Aug 21, 2011 Early Alfred Hitchcock film starring Ivor Novello, based on a story by Marie Belloc Lowndes and a play Who Is He? co-written by Belloc Lowndes, concerning the hunt for a serial killer in London. According to Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto the film is "the first time Hitchcock has revealed his psychological attraction to the association between sex and murder, between ecstasy and death." The film also features Hitchcock's first recognizable film cameo, something which was to become a standard practice for the remainder of his films.

public-domain-review

Aug 21, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:07.950655

the-phantom-of-the-opera-1925

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Sep 17, 2011 First film adaptation, directed by Rupert Julian, of Gaston Leroux's novel. The film features Lon Chaney in the title role as the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to force the management to make the woman he loves a star. It is most famous for Lon Chaney's intentionally horrific, self-applied make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film's premiere.

public-domain-review

Sep 17, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:08.476282

trapeze-disrobing-act-1901

Trapeze Disrobing Act (1901) Aug 21, 2011 A naughty little skit from 1901 filmed by the Edison company.

public-domain-review

Aug 21, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:08.957284

space-colony-art-from-the-1970s

Space Colony Art from the 1970s Aug 23, 2011 In “The Colonization of Space”, his 1974 essay for Physics Today, Princeton professor of physics Gerard K. O’Neill (1927–1992) wrote that the key for extraterrestrial habitation is “to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy”. Were construction to commence shortly, he predicted “nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century from now”. Rather than terraforming Mars, or settling the jungles of Jupiter, O’Neill proposed constructing habitable cylinders — modifications of the environments first designed by John Desmond Bernal in 1929 — that would spin on their axes through space, simulating Earth’s gravity and using a system of mirrors and apertures to approximate tellurian days and seasons. In his High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977), written as a speculative dispatch from the future, it is the accommodating gyroscopic cylinder, not the planetary sphere, that holds the secret for life freed from earthen ground. To go on with our situation, it's a comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables and fruit are in season all the time, because there are agricultural cylinders for each month of the year, each with its own day-length. We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden, and never need to use insecticide sprays. Of course we like being able to get a suntan without ever being bitten by a mosquito. To be free of those pests, it's worth it to go through the inspections before getting aboard the shuttle from Earth. The cylinder becomes a kind of Eden regained in O’Neill’s fantasy, an Arcadia retrofitted with solar panels and cosmic-ray shields. Not only can you slurp personal papayas under a bug-free sun, but laborers tasked with processing raw space materials will have time for “reading magazines” during their zero-gravity commutes. Resource mining will be automated, leaving workers plenty of opportunity for “swapping stories and passing the coffee-pot back and forth”. Even television reception will be better, and “the ubiquitous, ugly TV antenna of American suburbia will vanish”, due to receivers built directly into the cylindrical endcaps. The images gathered below were created in the mid-1970s during O’Neill’s summer research programs on space colonization held at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The artists include Don Davis, who would later help design the visuals for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, and Rick Guidice, who illustrated space projects for NASA across fifteen years. In an interview about the project, Davis discusses how his images of O’Neill’s ideas still have a “freshness”, for they continue to embody “the aspirations people have had ever since the space age began”. While this is certainly true — and the artists’ visions of artificial cylindrical worlds have had an outsized influence on science fiction — these psychedelic vistas populated by high-tech homes and cocktail-sipping residents were also a product of their cultural climate. It was a heady time for both artists and theorists. A report on O’Neill’s 1977 summer study, claiming that space cities would be feasible by 1990, appeared next to Timothy Leary’s unhinged essay about “The Psychological Effects of High Orbital Migration”, in which the hallucinogen researcher expressed his concerns about “the South Americanization of Space (i.e. the emergence of civil-service bureaucracies, military dictatorships, class struggle, centralized monopolies, imposition of standardized life-styles)”. As the space race cooled off during the Cold War’s Détente — symbolized by the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, which saw American and Soviet astronauts shaking hands in outer space — O’Neill lost faith in NASA’s ability and political will to support new ventures in space colonization. From the late 1970s onward, in Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy’s words, “he never stayed from a belief that the private sector would be the only organization capable of opening the space frontier”. It seems one of his students was listening intently. If Jeff Bezos’ mockups of Blue Origin space colonies feel as dated as they do grim, it is because they borrow heavily from Gerard O’Neill, whom he studied under at Princeton in the 1980s, and the artworks featured below.

public-domain-review

Aug 23, 2011

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excerpt-from-handel-s-israel-in-egypt-1888

Excerpt from Handel’s Israel in Egypt (1888) Sep 13, 2011 Until the discovery of an 1860 recording of “Au clair de la lune” in 2009, this haunting excerpt from Handel's oratorio recorded in 1888 was the oldest known recorded human voice in existence. A note on the cylinder reads: "A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away". It was recorded by Col. George Gouraud, a foreign sales agent for Thomas Edison on June 29 at The 1888 Ninth Triennial Handel Festival at Crystal Palace, London, only a few days after the death of the German Emperor, Friedrich III. The conductor is August Manns.

public-domain-review

Sep 13, 2011

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quicksand-1950

Quicksand (1950) Sep 4, 2011 Film noir directed by Irving Pichel starring Mickey Rooney, in what many consider to be the best performance of his career, Peter Lorre, and Jeanne Cagney. Needing money for a date, Rooney borrows $20 from the cash register, starting a chain of events that includes car theft, burglary, and possibly murder.

public-domain-review

Sep 4, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:10.422971

operation-cue-1955

Operation Cue (1955) Sep 4, 2011 Original color version of the 1955 atom bomb test in Nevada, showing the effects on test houses and utilities located at various distances from the blast. Operation Cue was one of a myriad of smaller tests conducted under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) developmental program, Operation Teapot.

public-domain-review

Sep 4, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:10.885985

men-in-wigs

Men in Wigs Aug 24, 2011

public-domain-review

Aug 24, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:11.348558

field-columbian-museum-1894-1920

Field Columbian Museum (1894–1920) Sep 13, 2011 Opened in 1894, the Field Columbian Museum was created to house the artefacts from the anthropology, botany, geology and zoology collections at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Originally named the Columbian Museum of Chicago, the museum originally occupied the only building remaining from the Exposition, the Palace of Fine Arts, now home to the Museum of Science and Industry. In 1921 the Museum moved to its present site on Chicago Park District property in the centre of town. The Museum has undergone a few name changes in its time. In 1905, the name changed to Field Museum of Natural History to honour the Museum's first major benefactor, Marshall Field, and so also to better reflect its focus on the natural sciences. A further name change occurred between 1943 and 1966, when the museum was known as the Chicago Natural History Museum, before it reverted to the Field Museum of Natural History.

public-domain-review

Sep 13, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:40:11.816370

landscape-and-marine-views-of-norway

Landscape and Marine Views of Norway Aug 16, 2011 Selection of images from "Landscape and marine views of Norway" (ca.1890-1900), a set in the Library of Congress' Photochrom Prints Collection. Photochrom prints are colorized images produced from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic limestone printing plates, with each colour tint applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, tint stones. A very popular method at the turn of the century.

public-domain-review

Aug 16, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:12.296270

are-you-popular-1947

Are You Popular? (1947) Aug 21, 2011 One of the best examples of post-World War II social guidance films - jam-packed full of useful tips.

public-domain-review

Aug 21, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:12.742920

annie-oakley-1894

Annie Oakley (1894) Aug 28, 2011 Annie Oakley was probably the most famous marksman/woman in the world when this short clip was produced in Edison's Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Barely five feet tall, Annie was always associated with the wild west, although she was born in 1860 as Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee (or Moses) in Darke County, Ohio. Nevertheless, she was a staple in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and similar wild west companies. Because of her diminutive stature, she was billed as "Little Sure Shot." The man assisting her is this appearance is probably her husband, Frank E. Butler. Annie had outshot Butler (a famous dead-eye marksman himself) in a shooting contest in the 1880's. Instead of nursing his bruised ego because he had been throughly outgunned by a woman, Butler fell in love, married Little Sure Shot, and became her manager. Theirs was a solid and happy marriage that lasted 44 years, and when Annie died on November 3, 1926, at age 66, a heartbroken Butler followed her to the grave 18 days later.

public-domain-review

Aug 28, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:13.192037

betty-boop-minnie-the-moocher-1932

Betty Boop: Minnie The Moocher (1932) Sep 18, 2011 Minnie the Moocher defined Betty's character as a teenager of a modern era, at odds with the old world ways of her parents. In the cartoon, after a disagreement with her parents, Betty runs away from home, accompanied by her boyfriend Bimbo, only to find themselves in a haunted cave. A ghostly walrus (rotoscoped from live-action footage of Calloway), sings Calloway's famous song "Minnie the Moocher", accompanied by a whole troupe of other ghosts and skeletons. This haunting performance sends the frightened Betty and Bimbo back to the safety of "home sweet home".

public-domain-review

Sep 18, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:13.667970

alexander-bathysphere

Alexander in the Bathysphere Text by Hunter Dukes May 12, 2022 While the bathysphere was not named until the 1930s (“bathy” from the Greek prefix for deep), humans may have been using diving bells for millennia. In the Problemata, a text contentiously credited to Aristotle, the philosopher tells how his student Alexander the Great descends to the depths of the sea in “a very fine barrel made entirely of white glass”, as a later poet would put it. The reasons for this descent differ across time. For some, it was to scout submarine defenses surrounding the city of Tyre during its siege. Others depict the Macedonian king met with a cruel vision of the great chain of being, stating, upon resurfacing, that “the world is damned and lost. The large and powerful fish devour the small fry”. In one particularly elaborate version, Alexander submerges with companions — a dog, cat, and cock — entrusting his life to a mistress who holds the cord used to retrieve the bathysphere. However, during his dive, she is seduced by a lover and persuaded to elope, dropping the chains that anchor Alexander and his animal companions to their boat. Through a gruesome utility, the pets help him survive: the cock keeps track of time in the lightless fathoms, the cat serves as a rebreather to purify the vessel’s atmosphere, and the poor hound’s body becomes a kind of airbag, propelling Alexander back to the sea’s surface. In the visual arts, Alexander’s primitive submarine did not prove popular until more than a millennium after his death, when various vernacular adaptations of the Alexander Romance, a largely fictional biographical account, became a common subject for illuminated manuscripts. The miniatures, folios, and tapestry gathered below show Alexander menaced by denizens of the deep. A fourteenth-century illumination made in Flanders has a gigantic fish hovering above the glass keg — where the sceptered emperor sits framed by flaming sconces — while his dog deserts him for ghostly nudes, who seem to taunt the cuckolded king. A twin-tailed siren appears to wear Alexander’s crown, while the submariner crouches helplessly, in a miniature from Johannes Harlieb’s fifteenth-century Alexander, and an illumination featured in Jean Wauquelin’s version of the romance imagines the king flanked by tusked mammals and Gog-and-Magog-style cannibals eating underwater apples. From chalk-and-ink drawings, through half-colored scenes, to a seventeenth-century version of the “Serbian Alexandria” — where a seemingly depthless crowd of bowler-hatted men watch as a creature, resembling the lovechild of a scorpion and lobster, blindsides Alexander — this fantastical episode has led to diverse representations across countries, languages, and centuries. “Although not part of the original narrative and only later attached to the Romance in European, Arabic, and Persian traditions”, writes Su Fang Ng, the diving bell became iconic, “recasting the conqueror into an ‘inventor and sage’”. A particularly stunning sixteenth-century visualization was inspired from a Perisan epic poem, made, as Kanishk Tharoor recounts, by “a Hindu artist in India for a Turkic Muslim ruler with strong ties to Central Asia”. Here Alexander leaves behind a rolling landscape of castles and ice-encrusted mountains for the uncharted world below. The bathysphere’s formal containment mirrors two other episodes from the Alexander legend: his aerial flight (f. 20v), charioted by griffins, which served as an exemplum superbiae (example of pride) on medieval church facades, and his meeting with Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher who lived in a barrel. As Plutarch recounts in Alexander, the king was impressed by how the Cynic paid him no mind, desiring only that the monarch not cast a shadow over the patch of sun in which he was lazing. “It is said that Alexander was so struck by this”, writes Plutarch, that he declared: “But verily, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes”. Perhaps a similar longing for alternative lives shows through in the images featured here. Not content with having conquered large swaths of the earth, the emperor seeks a newer world. During one first-person rendering of the tale, after his diving bell has been crushed by an aquatic beast, the king tells himself: “Alexander, now you must give up attempting the impossible, or you may lose your life in attempting to explore the deep.”

public-domain-review

May 12, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:14.492527

equality-of-the-sexes

Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes (1790) Text by Paloma Ruiz Feb 8, 2022 For as long as women have been wearing decorative jewelry, donning designer clothing, and delighting in female companionship, we have been accused of a proclivity for the fanciful. Stereotypes abound about the feminine urge to tell stories: the secretly slanderous best friend; the garrulous old woman tirelessly engaged with spreading gossip. In her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) sardonically examines these misogynistic stereotypes, turning them upside down. She argues that the vicissitudes of female fashion are evidence of artistry, and the story-telling a natural symptom of untapped creativity. Those characteristics, which are so often cast in a negative light, could actually be the result of incredible imagination. In Sargent’s understanding, the only difference between gossip and ground-breaking scientific invention is a lack of access to education. In the year 1779, Sargent wrote an essay entitled “The Sexes” and proceeded to circulate it amongst friends for over a decade. That piece’s revised counterpart, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, was published in 1790, in the March and April issues of Massachusetts Magazine (a “Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment”). Although Sargent published under the pseudonym “Constantia” — occasionally going by “The Reaper”, “Honora Martesia”, “Mr. Vigilius”, or “The Gleaner” — her identity as the author of “Equality” was fairly well-known. Born into a family of wealthy, ship-owning merchants, Sargent received a preliminary education which far outweighed that of other American women at the time. The first of eight children, she was taught how to read and write by her mother, and was then allowed to share a tutor with her younger brother Winthrop. This arrangement lasted until Winthrop turned ten, when he was sent to Boston Latin School in preparation for his enrollment at Harvard only three years later. These clear disparities, present even within the close confines of her familial circle, were a catalyst in her advocacy for equal education. “Equality” argues that one cannot deny women’s inherent ability to use reason and judgment, especially when they are not given the opportunity to train academically. While “nature with equality imparts”, it is our cultural nurturing of female minds that has been left in the dark. An influence behind “Equality” was the unavoidable sociopolitical rumbling of the American Revolution. In 1775, the first full-fledged battle broke loose in Lexington and Concord, and by 1779, having declared independence from England, the American colonies were locked in a long-winded war to ensure their continued sovereignty. Surrounded by the wide-spread rhetoric of liberty, equality, and a right to the pursuit of happiness, Sargent was inspired to apply these same principles to the sexes. The language of war is a recurring facet of “Equality”, as Sargent describes the intricate social dance between men and women. When girls enter into the world, “it is expected that with the other sex we should commence immediate war. . . we must rise superior to, and obtain a complete victory over those who have been long adding to the native strength of their minds”. Not only are women expected to defend against the sexual and romantic advances of men, Sargent also suggests that they must engage in an intellectual battle against those who have been given the advantage of a long and thorough education. Drawing a parallel between the colonies and equality-seeking women — rebellious bodies attempting to throw off the reigns of an oppressive ruler — Sargent writes that “we will meet upon every ground, the despot man; we will rush with alacrity to the combat, and, crowned by success, we shall then answer the exalted expectations which are formed”. In spite of such victorious imagery, Sargent quickly goes on to clarify that, although women are equal in terms of imagination, reason, memory, and judgment, we are beholden to men for their physical superiority. In a plea largely uncharacteristic of the essay as a whole, she asks, “shield us then, we beseech you, from external evils”. This, too, is potentially a byproduct of revolutionary trepidation. The same year that Sargent wrote “The Sexes”, the coastal air of Gloucester unexpectedly filled with the sound of alarms. It was rumored that four warships were steadily approaching the harbor, and Sargent, alone in her house, was forced to flee into the woods along with countless other terrified women and children. Although the warships never arrived, Sargent remembered this moment of vulnerability, as well as the men who rushed to the coastline while she ran for the trees. “On the Equality of the Sexes” quickly became an important foundation for the figure of the “Republican Mother”. As the United States began its establishment as an independent nation, there was an emphasis on the woman’s duty to raise patriotic sons. The writings of John Locke were popular amongst the social elite, who spread his philosophy that children are innately innocent, and must be carefully molded through motherly warmth. Abigail Adams was a large proponent of educating mothers so that they, in turn, could educate their sons to be smart future voters. The values of republican motherhood can be detected in Sargent’s suggestion that women should be educated in order to serve as happier companions to their husbands. This argument seeks to elevate the position of women without disturbing traditional gender roles. Readers are repeatedly reassured that women will continue to clean homes and bake cakes, but an education will allow them to cater to their husbands’ and sons’ intellects as they do so.

public-domain-review

Feb 8, 2022

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:14.975864

gartside-theory-of-colours

“The Rainbow for their Guide”: Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 12, 2022 Mary Gartside’s An Essay on a New Theory of Colours is the expanded edition of An Essay on Light and Shade (1805), “one of the rarest and most unusual books about colour ever published”, claims Alexandra Loske, a historian of colour and curator at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. On the surface, this tract appears to sit neatly within the tradition of instructional artist’s manuals. Indeed, Mary Gartside worked as a watercolour teacher and botanical painter, exhibiting her drawings at the Royal Academy in 1781. And yet, the Essay makes use of an intellectual palette whose spectrum exceeds Gartside’s pedagogical contemporaries. It is best remembered, rather, as an exemplar of the myriad early-nineteenth century treatises on colour — works inspired, in part, by the newfound availability of novel pigments. Gartside’s Essay is largely concerned with those gradations between the primary colours, appealing to both students and “philosophical readers” through its discussion of tint, warmth, transformation, and luminance. Referencing Isaac Newton’s experiments with prismatic refraction (picture Pink Floyd’s album art for The Dark Side of the Moon), Gartside explains the phenomenon to “young ladies who have not seen [the Prismatic Spectrum]”, while offering analysis and critique of eighteenth-century theories proposed by Gerard de Lairesse and William Herschel, namely the latter’s investigation into the order of colours. Not only did Gartside antedate James Sowerby’s A New Elucidation of Colours (1809) and Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) — drawing parallel conclusions about “the effect of colour combinations, the significance of light and shade in relation to tints, and the eye of the beholder as the centre and origin of colour perception” — the handcoloured illustrations for the Essay, unique to each volume, have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting. We know very little about Gartside’s biography. According to Loske, she appears to be one of the only nineteenth-century women to have composed “theoretical treatises on colour”, nearly a century before Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published her Color Problems (1902). “The very modesty of the genre”, writes Ann Bermingham, in reference to why the theorist had to disguise her optical treatise as a how-to guide, “obscured the originality of [her] inquiries”, which, in turn, allowed Gartside to pursue scientific matters without reproach. Read in this light, one footnote in the Essay becomes particularly illuminating: . . . though I know the old masters took the rainbow for their guide, the little opportunity I have had of seeing their works, has prevented me observing how they availed themselves of the lessons it afforded them. They also possessed a degree of philosophical knowledge, that made them profit more speedily from their observations than any one can do without that knowledge; who must ignorantly copy nature, till some scientific person shall point out the way to do it to advantage. Yet if Gartside did, in fact, “copy nature” in her floral work, it was not out of ignorance, and the results were anything but derivative. Resembling hydrangeas refracted through an otherworldly prism, the watercolour illustrations that accompany her Essay — featured below — are described by the artist as “compact blots of colours”, which, placed before the beholder’s imaginative eye, are capable of conjuring white dog roses, scarlet poppies, and wild hops, “clinging with graceful wreaths and festoons” to evergreen shrubs.

public-domain-review

Apr 12, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:15.432540

durer-pillow-studies

Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies (1493) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 22, 2022 In his early twenties, after years of wanderjahr-ing across Europe, Albrecht Dürer returned home to Nuremberg, now fully trained in his craft. During this moment of transition, the young artist completed a double-sided line-drawing in pen. On one side, we find a self-portrait of Dürer. The artist is bodiless, except for an outsized hand, posed as if holding a pen too thin to see. A pillow appears below his shoulder-length hair, pressed into a hatched shadow, which mirrors the darkness of his palm. While the artist’s portrait is believed to have been a preparation for Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle (1493) — considered “one of the earliest independent self-portraits in Western painting” — the presence of hand and cushion create an unlikely trinity. There is “a harmony that you wouldn’t expect at first”, says curator Stijn Alsteens, as the observing eye, recording hand, and object of study come into alignment. Yet there is also something uncanny about the chosen perspective, for the pillow “looms upward toward the viewer, unsupported, at an angle that is difficult to explain”. This spatial ambiguity, argues Freyda Spira, “brings to life a composition that could easily have looked like three isolated studies”. On the verso side, we find a composition brought to life in another way — six pillows, contorted into the shape of fitful sleep, which seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams. There is the same spatial ambiguity of the recto: the hatching on the first two pillows extends beyond their borders to become shadows on the page, while the other cushions float in a depthless vacuum. No countenance of the artist features here, but if you look long enough, the cushions’ folds may assume the contours of distorted faces. “Once set in motion”, writes Joseph Leo Koerner, “this game of ‘seeing as’ can be played indefinitely, transforming corners into noses, chins, or satyrs’ horns, and creases into mouths and brows, until each pillow is animated by a number of hypothetical masks frowning, laughing, fretting, and speaking”. The drawings take the German word for pillow, Kopfkissen (headpillow), literally, fashioning Kissen into Kopf. ※※Indexed under…Facesin pillows Dürer’s treatment of the pillow can be neatly nested in the tradition of “drapery studies”, a vehicle for a young artist to explore the play of light on folds and its expressive possibilities. And yet, when viewed in relation to Dürer's self-portrait overleaf, the six pillows also read like notes toward the artist’s later aesthetic theories, articulated in the postscript to the third volume of The Four Books on Human Proportion, especially his concern with dream, reality, and the imagination’s recombinatory powers. “Therefore, if he [the artist] were to live many hundreds of years, and labor to the best of his abilities, if he so wished, through the power of God he would daily spill out and make new forms of men and other creatures that nobody had ever seen or thought of before.” Anticipating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of the imagination’s esemplastic power — “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation. . . [the imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” — by several centuries, Dürer also admonishes the would-be Prometheus. An artist “should be cautious not to make something impossible that nature would not allow, unless it would be that one wanted to make a dream work [traumwerk], in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.” These pillows, then, might be viewed as a kind of memory foam, which not only preserves the partial imprints of a sleeper’s face, but also the fantastic, hybrid creatures that populate her dreamscapes. ※※Indexed under…FoldingFigures created throughMemoryPillows retaining

public-domain-review

Feb 22, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:15.771987

william-james-stream-of-consciousness

William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 1, 2022 First published as a standalone volume on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses turns one hundred this week. Even if you have never immersed yourself in the modern reimagining of Homer’s seafaring epic, a related phrase may have drifted across your awareness: the name for a narrative technique employed by Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and myriad other writers that rub shoulders within the ever-bulging periodic and aesthetic borders of modernist literature: stream of consciousness. Scholars believe “stream of consciousness” was first used as a description of literary style by the British writer May Sinclair, during a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels for The Egoist in 1918. Eschewing the “philosophical cant of the nineteenth century” — mannered depictions of the world that passed for “realism” — May prefers the mess of the mind. “Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife.” To capture this fluidity, the novelist must “plunge in”, which Richardson does in her monumental thirteen-novel Pilgrimage sequence. “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and going. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on”, writes May. Although James Wood and others have argued that there is nothing uniquely modernist about representing “the movement of the mind” upon the page, the psychological theory of mind that informs May’s review can be traced to a chapter in William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890). Harvard professor, physician, investigator of psychic communication, “father of American psychology”, and the brother of novelist Henry James, William James begins “The Stream of Thought” by acknowledging that any psychological vocabulary will be rough-hewn when it comes to the fine-cut facets of mental phenomena, comparing what follows to “a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear”. But the psychologist is being modest, for he immediately launches into a polished discussion of “anesthetic somnambulists”, subconscious personages, and the possibility of thoughts existing without a thinker. This is all a preface for the larger concept: that our minds seem to ebb and flow with ideas, while emotions behave almost tidally, rising and falling in relation to intangible forces, as if a moon presses gravitationally upon our psychic seas. James was not the first to analogize the mind as a river — Alexander Bain had used the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1855 and the Buddhist concept of “mindstream” (citta-santāna), characterizes selfhood in a similar way. In The Principles of Psychology, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity: how ideas, feelings, and sensations, both present and past, cohere into the experience of a continuous self, that ever-present “I”, which meanders through the mind from childhood until our deaths and possibly beyond. Invoking Heraclitus by name, James repurposes his idea — that a person can never wade into the same river twice: “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. . . . In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” Beneath this stream, to continue his fluvial metaphor, sits the silt and pebbled bed of the unconscious, voluntary and involuntary memories, and even alternative persona. In contrast to the theories of Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and other early psychologists who practiced at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and cultivated damaging theories regarding female hysteria), James thought “the fact that the mind contains multiple streams of consciousness which at times rise to the surface was not something to be feared”, writes Alicia Puglionesi. In other words, the self contains multitudes and always has. If consciousness is a stream, what are the banks and channels that guide its course? James alighted on a concern that would preoccupy spelunkers of cognition in the decades to follow: the deadening effects of habit, the diminishing returns of repetitive pleasures, whether gustatorial, aesthetic, or spiritual. As if trying to refresh the perception of his reader’s glazed eyes, James lapses literary when addressing the topic, assuming the voice of a world-weary male: From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows. . . once so divine, the stars, the wood, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what *was* there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? The turn of the century saw a proliferation of treatises on the dulling effects of routine. Works such as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) Albert Lemoine’s L’Habitude et L’Instinct (1875), Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis in Mental Life”(1903), and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917) evidence the widespread concern — voiced by philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, sociologists, and novelists across a wealth of languages — about the way increasingly mechanized, mediated, and urbanized societies downregulate stimulus response. While Pater speculated that “our failure is to form habits”, Samuel Beckett would concede in a 1930 essay on Marcel Proust that the stream of consciousness only appears consistent due to the regulatory effects of habitual action: “Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.” Though influenced by Henri Bergson, Beckett’s idea may not have been possible without the work of William James, who dedicated a 1914 essay to the topic, and meditated on habit and the continuity of selfhood at length in “The Stream of Thought”. Art has long offered an antidote to what James describes as the decay of excitement into insipidity. In Percy Shelley’s famous dictum: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. From Stephen Hero, his early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to Finnegans Wake, written in a stream of unconsciousness — “an imitation of the dream-state” — Joyce maintained a cryptic interest in the ability of literary language to prompt epiphany, defined, by his character Stephen, as: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase in the mind itself. . . . it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In Ulysses, the “stream of consciousness” technique not only faithfully represents the mind by violating the supposed objectivity of nineteenth-century realism, as May Sinclair described, but leaves its reader, perhaps, with an enhanced consciousness of their own cognition. Take, for instance, a scene in the “Lestrygonians” episode that occurs along the waters, when the adman Leopold Bloom crosses Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey. We begin in the third person, as a narrator describes how Bloom scans the river, finding a clever advertisement — for a London clothier, selling trousers in its Dublin outlet at eleven shillings a pair — mounted on a docked and rocking rowboat: His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.        Kino’s        11/-        TrousersGood idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. The ad is not summarized or offset by quotation marks: we see it as Bloom does. And suddenly, without marked transition, we are inside his mind, surfing the stream of consciousness as Bloom reflects, like Heraclitus and James before him, on the everchanging fluidity of inner and outer life. It’s a brilliant passage, for — as aqueous advertising seeps into free-flowing thought — Bloom himself becomes an advertisement for Joyce’s style, how the author approximates the treacly swells of cognition, plunging us deep into the thick river of reality.

public-domain-review

Feb 1, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:16.263375

hitchcock-illustrations

Orra White Hitchcock’s Scientific Illustrations for the Classroom (1828–40) Text by Elaine Ayers Apr 28, 2022 After meeting and falling in love with Edward Hitchcock, her employer at Massachusetts’ Deerfield Academy, Orra (née White) married him in 1821, beginning a lifetime of professional collaboration while raising a family amid piles of rocks and research tomes. Highly trained, white, and wealthy, she was far from an oddity in nineteenth-century education. Like many other women of her class, Hitchcock received extensive instruction in the arts and sciences, making a name by working alongside, not beneath, a man who had easier access to academic opportunities. Variously lauded as “an anomaly” and “the most remarkable” of their era, her scientific illustrations have rarely been considered on their own terms — admired for the natural historical and religious knowledge they contain — without being made an exemplar of the broader category of “women’s work”. Moving to Amherst when Edward was appointed Professor of Chemistry and Natural History, the couple embarked on a decades-long exploration of the Connecticut River Valley’s botany and geology. While Edward lectured to eager young students about the principles of nature, from the depths of oceans to the granite veins of the earth, Orra produced more than sixty hand-colored scientific illustrations on poster-sized linen swaths designed to be hung on classroom walls. Ranging from extinct mammals like Megatherium (a genus of giant ground sloth) through lithic strata to fossilized footprints, the collection is striking for its modern abstraction, anticipating the later works of George Maw. Although some of Hitchcock’s geological illustrations seem far from “accurate” in their specificity (or lack thereof), her devotion to clear and concise visual communication bespeaks a deep-seated understanding of complex scientific principles. Hitchcock was occasionally drawn toward the fantastical — as in her drawing of a monstrous octopus devouring a ship — making some of her work feel more at home alongside creations by later spiritualist artists, such as Hilma af Klint, than with her contemporaries’ textbook illustrations. Like later spiritualist visionaries, Hitchcock viewed art, science, and religion as an observational holy trinity. These practices (that we might now consider disparate) worked perfectly in concert, producing a deeply devout view of the planet’s sedimentary and biological principles. Serving within New England’s Congregationalist Church, the Hitchcocks believed in “gap creationism” — an argument for the undefined lapse between the two separate creation events described in the Book of Genesis — and saw no conflict in interpreting the Bible literally in light of the growing evidence for ever-longer geologic time. Using dramatic color and simple line techniques, Orra Hitchcock points to a deceptively simple consistency underlying some of the most controversial questions of the day. By illustrating and describing fossil records, the puzzling living creatures around them, and local landscapes so marked by change, Orra and Edward honored the complexity, and, paradoxically, the elemental simplicity, of God’s hand in shaping the earth. While it can be easy to assume a wholesale paradigm shift in evolutionary thinking after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Hitchcock’s illustrations allow us to remember the many naturalists who were able to reconcile religious ideas about the world’s origins with growing evidence for its much-older beginnings. Edward’s oft-cited dedication to Orra in his 1851 The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences rings of the pandering patriarchal gratitude found in so many books of the past: “how little could I have done in the cause of science, had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a numerous family!” Nevertheless, the couple’s love, expressed through the language of science, comes through clearly in their personal correspondence. Far from merely translating her husband’s discoveries into visual imagery, Hitchcock produced original knowledge about extinction, stratigraphy, and their evidentiary features in the surrounding landscape. Working next to Edward in their Amherst home, Orra meticulously outlined and hand-colored bolts of linen, training eager young students to recognize and describe geological and natural-historical phenomena. Future students can view Hitchcock’s wide-ranging illustrations, featured below, courtesy of Amherst College.

public-domain-review

Apr 28, 2022

Elaine Ayers

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:16.559728

kessel-four-parts-of-the-world

Ferdinand van Kessel’s Four Parts of the World (ca. 1689) Text by Paloma Ruiz Mar 23, 2022 In these bewildering landscapes by Flemish artist Ferdinand van Kessel (1648–1696), the built environment of the human world feels almost superfluous. The guard towers of Puerto Rico, plazas of Damascus, and church steeples of Stockholm are all sequestered behind a series of vibrant animal tableaus. Commissioned circa 1689 for King John III Sobieski of Poland, Ansichten aus den vier Weltteilen mit Szenen von Tieren (Views from the four parts of the world with scenes of animals) consists of sixty-eight oil paintings atop copper plates. For each continental region — Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas — sixteen nine-inch-wide landscape scenes from the outskirts of notable cities are organized around a large, central panel, forming four complete works of more than five feet in length. Born into a lineage of renowned artists including Jan and Pieter Bruegel (the Elders), Ferdinand’s father, Jan van Kessel, was an accomplished painter in his own right, whose unique style distinguished him from other well-known naturalist illustrators. Rather than reproducing rows upon rows of carefully organized organisms, Jan van Kessel brought his creatures to life through dynamic compositions. Nearly three decades prior to his son’s commission, it was Jan who produced the original Four Parts of the World series (ca. 1660). Here, his technical skill and aesthetic bravado are on full display. Lions stand dramatically on muscular hind legs. Predatory birds dig their talons into snakes. Alligators are shown hatching from metallic blue eggs as rhinos puncture seemingly indifferent elephants. Garnering illustrative skill from his father’s works, Ferdinand inherited Jan’s meticulously crafted models of myriad flora and fauna. While Ferdinand’s “views” differ formally from those of his father, some include strikingly similar elements. Place their scenes for “Amsterdam” side by side and you will see the same pair of hares, a brown one leaping forth from its burrow, as its pale companion stalls. Elsewhere, as if recognizing his debts, Ferdinand forms an autograph out of insects, the way his father had in the central panel for Europe. When their landscapes approach remote climes, however, the Van Kessels’ painted creatures become increasingly strange, as observational accuracy decays into the exotic imaginary. “These fascinating pieces”, writes the art critic Saim Demircan, “reveal an undulating representation of angst. . . namely that of the unknown”. In a landscape from Jan van Kessel’s America, for example, muscular mermen with azul and yellow hair sit in conversation by the beach, alongside a fish that resembles a rotorcraft, thanks to a headdress of squid limbs. These same characters can be seen in Ferdinand van Kessel’s depiction of Luanda, Angola. Not only had neither artist actually observed these animals, but — at a distance from Europe — Africa and America blend together into a shared terrain of fantasy. The collection-like quality of the Van Kessels’ paintings recall the Kunstkammer tradition — rooms of curiosity replete with odd or foreign rarities, from antique art to ivory tusks — but their paneled arrangements also evoke kunstkasten: a class of seventeenth-century decorative cabinets, which often featured painted miniatures on copper sheets. By displaying their works in compartmentalized frames, Ferdinand and Jan van Kessel recast “the materials and luxury status of the kunstkast in order to create a fundamentally different, inverted object that privileges small-scale paintings over the furniture in which they were traditionally embedded and subordinated”, argues the curator Nadia Baadj. Freed from these enclosures, the paintings become like the landscapes they depict: the built environment of the human world recedes into a backdrop against which to experience miraculous, dynamic, and colorful, if sometimes impossible, animal forms. Below you can browse our selections from Ferdinand van Kessel’s Ansichten aus den vier Weltteilen series, courtesy of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum via Wikimedia Commons. You can also explore Jan van Kessel’s Africa, America, Asia, and Europe in the Museo del Prado’s collections.

public-domain-review

Mar 23, 2022

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:17.037600

dow-composition

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition) Text by Kevin Dann Feb 17, 2022 Widely celebrated by art historians as the first design text of the American Arts & Crafts movement, Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education revolutionized the American classroom. When Dow’s program for liberating individual artistic “Power” (his term for self-expression) came along in 1899, arts education was still locked into the academic tradition of copying the masters. Dow gave primary, secondary school, and even university teachers a visual grammar, a pattern language toolbox that could be used to make every aesthetic decision: right down to the decoration of their studios or the parlors in their homes. Composition’s presentation of visual art as an analytic and constructive — rather than imitative — activity was the first tangible breath of abstraction to reach the American classroom. And, for more than half a century, it was hailed by artists and art instructors alike as offering a system to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and patterns. Dow’s pedagogical mastery had humble Yankee roots; as an eighteen-year-old high school graduate in 1875, he taught farm children and teenagers in a one-room schoolhouse in a remote corner of Ipswich, Massachusetts. About this same time, Dow took up sketching as a complement to his pioneering antiquarian research in Ipswich’s town records, and then, finding inadequate the heliotype productions of his own hands and those of Boston printers, he began to practice wood engraving and lithography, always with a craftsman’s rigor. (He once spent an entire day hand-grinding a carpenter’s awl into an engraving tool for his first experiments with carving local pear wood.) Absent from the early editions of Composition, some of these experiments appear in the greatly expanded 1913 edition, which also includes color plates. Printed in green-gray ink, the 1905 edition beautifully conveys Dow’s central principle of “Notan” — a neologism adopted from Ernest Fenellosa, the influential art historian and Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator of Oriental Art, who combined the Japanese words for “light” and “dark” to describe the play and placement of contrast, without the distraction of other elements like color, texture, and fine details. Drawing on Dow’s experiences with students at both Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute (1896–1903) and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art (founded in 1890), Composition was unique in its inclusion of student work right alongside that of Renaissance and Japanese masters. While scholars unanimously attribute Dow’s artistic embrace and pedagogical promotion of ukiyo-e — the “pictures of the floating world” depicted in Japanese woodblock prints — to his encounter in early 1891 with Fenellosa, Dow had for a dozen years been cultivating a wholly original program of minimalist abstraction that grew organically out of his love for Ipswich’s unparalleled riparian landscape. When he declared that “one evening with Hokusai gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures”, it was due to a lifetime of haunting the marshy borders of the Ipswich River, Labor in Vain Creek, and Thatch Bank, which led Dow into mysticism, nurtured by his reading of Whitman and Thoreau as well as the Quietist tracts of French mystic Madame Guyon. Copying the inscriptions on seventeenth-century tombstones in Ipswich’s burying grounds, Dow appreciated how the blue, green, purple, and even pink-tinted slate gravestones harmonized with the hues of this region. His preference for the bluish haze of cyanotypes (a collection of 264 of which are viewable here) over photography was of a piece with his aversion to the stark white marble of modern headstones, which he called “coldly out of place by the side of the mossy green and purple slates of the first settlers, partaking of the colors of ground and sky”. The woodblock stamp on Composition’s title page — which imaged the low drumlin Eagle Hill fairly floating in the midst of the “Silver Dragon”, Dow’s name for a meandering tributary of the Ipswich River — bears the Greek letters for synthesis. Dow’s emblem proclaimed not just the synthesis of East and West, but of one’s inner landscape with outer Nature, which for this native of an inland reach of Plum Island Sound’s tidal estuary, was a floating world of dories, gundalows, hardwood copses, salt hay ricks, and billowing cumulus clouds rolling in from the Atlantic.

public-domain-review

Feb 17, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:17.549417

hainhofer-stammbuch

Philipp Hainhofer’s Große Stammbuch (1596–1633) Text by Kevin Dann Mar 17, 2022 Art dealer and diplomat Philipp Hainhofer's 227-page volume collects the signatures of over seventy-five of Europe’s most notable seventeenth-century nobles. A richly illustrated album amicorum — a kind of friendship book for preserving the autographs of acquaintances — the Große Stammbuch was renowned in Hainhofer’s lifetime, becoming one of Augsburg’s must-see artworks. This vellum Kunstkammer brings together the royal, semi-divine hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II [17], King of Denmark Christian IV [20] and Cosimo II de’ Medici [30] with exquisite drawings, a painting on silk, and embroidered panels made by dozens of artists, including Georg Behem, Tobias Bernhard, Joseph Heintz, Johann Mathias Kager, Lucas Kilian, Jacopo Ligozzi, and Anton Mozart. The cosmopolitan connoisseur Hainhofer rarely traveled without his Stammbuch, which he showed off to a wide network of aristocrats to win new contributions. A single entry was often the result of months spent negotiating with a signatory and artists. Though occasionally a royal would commission her own page, Hainhofer usually had the leaves painted to his taste, which the duchess or king would then sign and otherwise personalize (with mottos or brief inscriptions). Expenses — paid by the contributor — ranged from ten to fifty ducats. By 1610, Hainhofer was regularly receiving invitations for personal audiences with potential autographers. And, in September 1612, when Hainhofer visited François de Lorraine [103] to solicit his hand, the Count attempted to keep the book by force, only surrendering it after the diplomatic intervention of the Elector of Cologne. Hainhofer’s passion for natural history encircles the earliest signatures, gathered from university friends while he was an eighteen-year-old law student in Padua and Siena. The borders of entries by Ludwig Eberhard [137], the Count of Schwarzenberg [165], and Georg Christoph Ursenpeckh [179] harbor a menagerie of Italian birds, insects, and reptiles. For Johann Christoph, Baron of Puchaim [187], Hainhofer had an unidentified artist feature the red admiral butterfly, hinting perhaps at the signatory’s delicate qualities. There are also two double-page paintings of flora and fauna [138 and 180], one planted with Tulipa — the Asian import that led to horticultural mania in the first half of the seventeenth century. Coats-of-arms grace most of the Stammbuch’s pages, flanked by an array of intriguing allegorical figures and scenes that attest to the virtues of the signers, only a few of whom were sufficiently intimate with Hainhofer to be considered sui amico, “his friend”. By all accounts, the polyglot Hainhofer was as charming as the most dashing courtiers. Cultivating an insider’s ease with both trade guildsmen and emperors, he possessed expert knowledge of art, music, literature, and history. Famous for wearing a vial of fragrant rose balm around his neck, Hainhofer was genteel enough to win the favor of a dozen women royals, including Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia [24]. Hainhofer is best known to art historians for having overseen the creation of the Pommerscher Kunstschrank, an elaborate wonder cabinet for Philip II, Duke of Pomerania, his most important client and surely the closest friend included in the Stammbuch. Outside of Rudolf II and Cosimo II de’ Medici, Philip is the only person to merit two pages in the album. Facing the page bearing his motto and signature [37], we find a miniature portrait in black ink with liquid gold framing and decoration, fringed by four hymns of praise to the Lord. A Latin verse below declares that Philip’s “task was to polish the genius of the Muses”, which largely came about through his collaboration with Hainhofer. Lines of German text delineate Philip’s clothing and facial features, but they are difficult to decipher. That is one of the many labors left for the Herzog August Bibliothek’s scholars, who are in the midst of a three-year research project to fully explore the intricacies of the Stammbuch, a book the library's founder had, in fact, attempted to buy in 1648, a year after Hainhofer's death. Subsequently disappearing into private collections for nearly three centuries, it resurfaced at a London auction in 1931, and in 2020, for a princely sum of $3.1 million, the Große Stammbuch finally arrived at the library in Wolfenbüttel. You can browse the whole book in the embedded reader above and find our highlights from its pages in the gallery below. For more on seventeenth-century friendship books check out our Curator's Choice essay “Boys will be Boys” by Lynley Anne Herbert, and for a later example see our post on the album amicorum of Anne Wagner.

public-domain-review

Mar 17, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:18.056551

testa-anatomica

Filippo Balbi’s Testa Anatomica (1854) Text by Adam Green May 17, 2022 Of all the objects of daily sixteenth-century life — fruit, flora, fish and more — from which the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo made faces appear, the human body itself was not seemingly among them. The Pompidou houses a pair of late Rennaisance works in which the heads of Adam and Eve are formed from a wriggle of youths, but it is attributed to Arcimboldo's studio rather than the master himself. It’s not until Arcimboldo-esque works of the nineteenth century that we see the human figure used frequently in composite heads, and perhaps nowhere so strikingly as in fellow Italian artist Filippo Balbi’s Testa Anatomica (1854). If the tussle of youthful bodies that form the Pompidou’s Edenic duo points somehow to an innocence lost, in Balbi’s tortuous arrangement of older figures we can see, perhaps, the mortal effects of the Fall bear fruit. While these strained, almost écorché figures could be seen as the best vehicle to display anatomy, they might also writhe with the feelings of a man, soon to be fifty, entering the latter half of life. It’s an interpretation that emerges more forcefully after viewing Balbi’s self-portrait from some twenty years later — the artist posing, grey beard to his breast, with Testa Anatomica to one side and to the other a skull. You can see more Arcimboldo-inspired portraits in our survey of faces made from landscapes, and a wonderful series of aquatint prints (ca. 1800) depicting composite heads for popular professions comprised entirely from the tools of their trades.

public-domain-review

May 17, 2022

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:18.531525

giles-gingerbread

Knowledge by the Pound: The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread (1768) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 5, 2022 This stepwise saga of a rowdy youth’s progress toward Georgian bourgeois gentility is widely hailed as the paragon exemplar of Delectando monemus (instruction with delight): the motto of John Newbery, the pioneering children’s literature publisher. Seeing his son Giles hitching a ride on the back of Sir Toby Thomson’s fine coach, old Gaffer Gingerbread exhorts the lad with a tale. Sir Toby had, like Giles, begun his life in poverty, but rose to riches through a mastery of letters. When Giles begs his father to give him reading instruction, Gaffer bakes up a gingerbread alphabet, so that Giles literally becomes — as the book’s subtitle declares — “A little Boy who lived upon Learning”. The heart of Giles Gingerbread sees an alliterative alphabetic cascade, each of the letters redoubled (and sometimes tripled) — creating other scrumptious delicacies, like “Hogs-puddings and hot Cockles” — as Giles consumes the sweet letters with which he learns to read and write. This past January, when the American Library Association celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature, scholars re-evaluated the century of selections as having constructed a cock-eyed Eurocentric canon. John Newbery himself escaped critical scrutiny, though the “old friend of children” was a calculating proto-capitalist whose fortune had been built as much upon the sale of patent medicines as books, which routinely featured “puff” product placement for Dr. James’s Fever Powder, Dr. Hooper’s Female Pills, and other concoctions. Giles Gingerbread’s author remains uncertain, as Newbery made a career publishing the works of uncredited writers, who he sometimes treated like indentured laborers. Oliver Goldsmith was deemed a likely candidate by John Forster in the late-nineteenth century, a judgment that has been reproduced with thin proof (and challenged by Goldsmith biographers). A close reader might detect the linguistic fingerprints of another writer on Giles Gingerbread: the most gifted poet, fabulist, translator, and rhetorician in Newbery’s stable of talent, Christopher “Kit” Smart (1722–1771). “Tom Trip’s” rhyming frontispiece, pugnacious democratic Preface, and fascination with alliterative character names do sound like Smart, who suffered seven years of itinerant incarceration in mental asylums, an internment that may have been engineered by Newbery, the stepfather of Smart’s wife, Anna Maria Carnan. The Gingerbread family lives on in another Newbery production, The Fairing: or, a Golden Toy for Children of All Sizes and Denominations (1765), where Sam Gooseberry meets Gaffer and Giles at a fair, leading to a tour de force satire about the selling short of divine Eternity for mere human Time. Because the story alludes to Smart’s past literary successes, some scholars believe he wrote this wild borderland tale. And if, indeed, Smart authored The Fairing, did he also bake up Giles Gingerbread too?

public-domain-review

Apr 5, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:18.984718

bevis-uranographia

A Vanishing Nova: Uranographia Britannica (ca. 1749) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 6, 2022 In 1748, scientific instrument maker John Neale advertised the sale by subscription of a new “exact Survey of the Heavens”. It would offer not only “all the fix’d Stars hitherto observed in any Part of the World”, but also two planispheres of the Ptolemaic constellations and a historical account of the asterisms, “from the earliest Antiquity to the present Time”. The atlas relied on the work of Dr. John Bevis (1695–1771), a London physician who had devoted a year of his life to recording the nightly transits of stars from his observatory in Stoke Newington. Documenting faintly luminous entities down to the eighth magnitude, he added to those already cataloged — by John Flamsteed’s 1729 Atlas Coelestis and Edmond Halley’s southern hemisphere observations — for a total of 3550 stars. Best known to historians of astronomy for discovering the Crab Nebula (depicted in Taurus), Bevis contributed papers on eclipses and comets to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, making strides toward establishing the configuration and scale of the solar system, and helping to account for apparent irregularities in the motions of the moon and planets. At a time when the accurate measurement of longitude was of paramount importance to imperial British navigation, Bevis played a prominent role in the assessment of contending claims. Its size better suited than previous mammoth atlases for use with a telescope, the ambitious Uranographia was positioned to become astronomy’s state-of-the-art geographical guide to the heavens. The first atlas to use only English (not Latin) names for all the constellations, it may have also been the first to depict Uranus, and demonstrated scientific innovation through its representation of “not-so-fixed-stars”. Along with its astronomical significance and artistic beauty, Bevis’ Uranographia marks an important watershed in the history of celestial atlases: it was among the last to show allegiance to the old animated mythology of the heavens. Though a thoroughly modern astronomer, Bevis still adhered to the classical constellation figures in all their graphic glory. Johann Bode’s 1801 Uranographia largely copied Bevis’ depictions, but his representation of a new constellation, Globus Aerostaticus, as a Montgolfier balloon was a harbinger of ancient star worship's full displacement from the scientific field. In 1750, John Neale went bankrupt and the unreleased Uranographia Britannica was sequestered for decades by the London Court of Chancery. Had the atlas reached its subscribers, whose names appear in dedications below each plate, the Uranographia Britannica would have been one of the greatest working star charts produced during the Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas. Although Bevis was widely admired in British scientific circles as a sanguine gentleman, it was said that “he never again referred to his great atlas without showing a deep and bitter sense of loss”. Bevis died tragically in 1771, after falling from his telescope while measuring the Sun’s median altitude. Below you can browse, thanks to Wikimedia Commons, twelve hand-colored zodiac constellations from Uranographia Britannica. A complete, uncolored edition — featuring the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, two planispheres, and a chart of the southern constellations — is available courtesy of Linda Hall Library.

public-domain-review

Apr 6, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:19.438344

harris-list-of-covent-garden-ladies

Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1757–95) Text by Hunter Dukes May 12, 2022 The essayistic introductions of Harris’s List, an annual digest purporting to review and catalogue sex workers in Georgian London, did not shy away from castigating moralizers. The 1765 edition begins by claiming that “Ladies of Pleasure are public benefits”, while painting opponents of prostitution as zealous believers in the sentiment that, as versified by Matthew Prior’s Paulo Purganti and his Wife (1708): “The Nation ne’er will thrive, / Till all the whores are burnt alive”. Extinguishing this disgusting, incendiary charge, the author asks his readers to consider the Ancients, especially Horace’s anecdote about Cato the Elder, who congratulated a punter, upon exiting the brothel, for sequestering his lust away from “the wives and daughters of their neighbors”. Harris’s List shifts this praise from patron to provider. Commending prostitutes as the guardians of a harmonious polis, the List suggests that “the whole conduct” could be legalized or “regulated by rules”, urging “both Laws and Magistrates [to] be kind to those public-spirited Nymphs”. “Do we not owe to them the peace of families, of cities, nay of kingdoms?” asks the 1787 edition. “What villainies do they not prevent? What plots, what combinations, do they not dissolve? . . . What a miracle!” If some may see in these enthusiastic calls for decriminalization an echo of modern-day approaches (as practiced, for example, in the Netherlands), any trace of social progressivism wanes after this introductory foreplay gives way to the lists themselves. In format, these works present a bizarre melange of travel writing, guide books, yellow pages, and cheap erotica — reportage dissolves into racy fiction with the intent to “amuse and entertain the reader”, writes Sarah Toulalan. We encounter hundreds of barely redacted names, services rendered (using euphemisms such as “the Maypole of Love”), street addresses and prices, biographical information, employment history, and lengthy reviews of women and their temperaments. Miss Ph-llis of Tavistock Court is a “fine crummy plump-made dame”, specializing in the “elderly gentleman”, while Miss C-rb-tt of Bridges Street’s skin has a whiteness that “surpasses the new-fallen snow” and a heart comparable only to “Juno Queen of Heaven”. Others are treated far less kindly: Miss Th-m-es of Bow-Street is “too lusty and fat, but her limbs are exquisitely well turn’d”; the body of Mrs. Cl-l-nd of Swallow Street, who hails from Scotland, gets transformed through blazon into a highland landscape, whose “mountain, at the top, is not always destitute of flowers”; and Miss C-ll-ns of Oxford Street, formerly employed as a cow-keeper, has her lovemaking ridiculed with literary conceits, not to be repeated here, related to dairy farming and butter churning. ※※Indexed under…Butterchurning as sexual innuendo Reading both the praise and admonishment of particular sex workers, we begin to sense that the fundamental desire of the List’s author is less sexual than textual: his prose brims with awkward literary allusion and frequently tips into a purple register encumbered with stock similies. Miss N-wc-mb of King’s Place prompts an outburst borrowed from Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713): “I’m lost in extacy. / How shall I speak the transports of my soul?” Mrs. D-x-n has breath “like the fragrance of new mown hay”, while “Cupid has called forth his choicest arrow of the amorous kind to warm” Miss Ke-t of Tottenham Court Road, and there is “no one fitter” than Lambeth’s Mrs. B-nn-r “to initiate the young officiating priest in the deepest mysteries of his office.” Risqué metaphors are italicized throughout the list as if to announce their innuendo to even the most unimaginative mind. After Mrs. P-tt-rs-n, through the voice of our author, communicates her preference for elder clients (who give her “the longest pleasure”), she describes how “the eagerness and impetuosity of youth make the transports mere momentary . . . furnished with a profusion of the coin of love, they pay the liquid toll almost as soon as they have entered the gate; nay, sometimes at the very portal”. As historical documents, the surviving editions of Harris’s List — originally published in print-runs of roughly ten thousand copies — offer today’s readers a rare (though partial) glimpse into the sex trade of eighteenth-century London. While the Scottish statistician Patrick Colquhoun once estimated that 50,000 women, either partly or wholly, “resorted to Prostitution as a livelihood” by 1800, the British Library puts the number closer to six or seven thousand. The lists’ authorship remains opaque: it is possible that Jack Harris, a tavern waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head — who styled himself “The Pimp General of All England” — began the project, while Samuel Derrick took over the task in later years, continuing to use the Harris name for titillation. Published annually between 1757 and 1795, Harris’s List had precursors, such as The Wandering Whore (1660), which included a list of London’s “Crafty Bawds”, “Common Whores”, “Maiden-sellers”, “Night walkers”, and others who, according to this text, abided by the dictum that “mony and Cunny are good Commodities”. Yet Harris’s List proved the most popular example of this genre and has had a considerable afterlife: leading to spinoffs in other British cities, such as Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh (1775), and inspiring, by way of Hallie Rubenhold, BBC’s Harlots. In addition to raising questions about historical veracity and the politics of sex, reading Harris’s List reveals the potential violence of its form. In his 1996 essay “I’ve Got a Little List”, novelist William H. Gass writes that “the list detaches objects from their place in the world and enumerates them elsewhere”. Something similar happens here: body parts are isolated from their person, emotions decontextualized, and the amorous techniques of “ladies of pleasure” perversely reduced to a checklist for the male reader’s amusement. Above you can browse the 1787 edition of Harris’s List, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. The 1765, 1783, 1786, 1788, 1789, 1793, and 1794 editions are available through their respective linked dates.

public-domain-review

May 12, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:19.743162

schachtzabel-pigeons

Unnatural Selection: Emil Schachtzabel’s Pigeon Prachtwerk (1906) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 15, 2022 Those who deign to class pigeons as “rats of the sky” have clearly never seen a Pigmy Pouter. Nor, for that matter, a silver Jacobin, named because its ornate headdress (composed of a “hood”, “mane”, and “chain”) resembles the cowl worn by a sect of Dominican monks. Another breed of pigeons are actual nuns, cousins in kind to horsemen, barbs, dragoons, finnikins, and runts. As fanciful as their titles, the diverse appearance of these birds makes one wonder how they can all be classed as pigeon. The bug-eyed Budapest tumbler barely resembles the peacock-like fantail, the cropper, which can balloon its breast to softball proportions, or, indeed, the bizarre frillback, which, at first glance, appears tangled in a mass of perm-treated hair. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Darwin was substantiating his theories of artificial and natural selection, the pigeon served as a proving ground. “Among all the domesticated animals, the pigeons were the most divergent and yet the most clearly related to a single ancestor”, writes James A. Secord. Poised on “a classificatory edge”, they became a “perfect case study in the power of selection”. Citing Darwin by name in his reference book, Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen, Emil Schachtzabel came of age in the paradigm-molting wake of On the Origin of Species (1859), a work in which pigeons play a significant role. A government administrator by day, Schachtzabel’s passion for the bird led to an appointment as president of the Federation of German Poultry Breeders (Bund Deutscher Rassegeflügelzüchter). Yet he remains best known, perhaps, for his Prachtwerk. The lithographs from this work collected below, based on watercolor templates by Anton Schöner, illustrate the seemingly limitless boundaries of domesticated pigeons, as several birds intrude beyond their frames into the margins of the page. Pigeon cultivation weds artistry, Schachtzabel explains, with the manipulated mechanisms of evolution. Describing how marvelous combinations of feathers, shading, and color have emerged through the efforts of the pigeon’s protector — “the thinking man” (den denkenden Menschen) — he ponders what features might appear in future breeds, hoping his book will serve as inspiration. Schachtzabel combined two knowledge traditions that had not always overlapped: the practical wisdom of pigeon fanciers and the taxonomical theories of naturalists. As described in the Prachtwerk’s preface, Schöner positioned his lithographic pigeons at carefully chosen angles to give the fancier a better sense of golden proportions, toward which his or her own breeds could strive. Schachtzabel’s introduction, on the other hand, recognizes that turn-of-the-century fancying had been reinvigorated by advances in infrastructure — as postal, train, and shipping networks created new opportunities to obtain “fresh material” (frisches Zuchtmaterial) for crossbreeding. Just a few decades earlier, however, it was rare for fanciers to discuss the biological history of their prized columbiformes. “Fanciers almost unanimously believe that the different races are descended from several wild stocks”, wrote Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), “whereas most naturalists believe that all are descended from the Columba livia or rock-pigeon”. While many may associate the evolutionary biologist with Galapagan finches, critics and editors had tried to trim the wings of his On the Origin of Species before publication. Reverend Whitwell Elwin, who assessed the manuscript, calling it a “wild & foolish piece of imagination”, wrote to the publisher John Murray suggesting that Darwin limit his treatise to the pigeon content: “Every body is interested in pigeons. The book would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom, & soon be on every table.” Darwinian evolution may owe as much to the HMS Beagle as to a certain gin palace near London’s Borough Market, where the scientist would observe seasoned members of a pigeon club and their specimens. What gripped his mind was the diversity of color and aspect, the spectrum that Schöner would try to capture on the page. If the fanciers were to be believed, and these numerous, domestic breeds were crosses of kaleidoscopic aboriginal stocks, why had ornithologists only observed rock-pigeons in nature, which look far more like our feral city pigeons than any polychromic rarity? The answer, toward which Darwin was homing, involves genetic mutations, selected for by breeders who favored a flashy phenotypic expression. Yet every flamboyant breed descends from the same drab and common species — Columba livia. That is to say that next time you see a street pigeon, beak deep in a half-eaten kebab, know that its DNA contains a pallet richer than any painter’s dream, which — with a few centuries of strategic mating — could appear in the plumage of birds yet to come.

public-domain-review

Feb 15, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:20.268304

stream-of-time

The Stream of Time (1803–58) Text by Jo Livingstone Apr 20, 2022 In his foundational textbook Elements, the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid defined a line as “breadthless length” — a thing with only one dimension. That’s what lines can do to history when used to plot events: they condense its breadth into pure motion, featuring only those people and places that serve as forces thrusting it forwards along an infinite axis. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Strass proposed a different way to visualize time’s flow. A Prussian historian and schoolteacher, he published his chronological chart in 1803, a massive diagram titled Der Strom der Zeiten oder bildliche Darstellung der Weltgeschichte von den altesten Zeiten bis zum Ende des achtzehnden Jahrhunderts (The stream of the times or an illustrated presentation of world history from the most ancient times until the eighteenth century). The linear timelines that Strass resisted, like those inspired by Joseph Priestley, “implied a uniformity in the processes of history that was simply misleading”, write Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg. Strass’ stream, by contrast, allowed historical events to “ebb and flow, fork and twist, run and roll and thunder”. It would spawn several imitations as the century drew on. In Der Strom der Zeiten, Strass depicts human history from the year of “creation” (around 4000 BCE) to the “present day” through metaphorical bodies of flowing water. Working with the hodgepodge mixture of Biblical, classical, and imperial accounts of world history, his chart begins with large, vague springs like “Chinese” and “Assyrian”, which themselves have no precursor, while Europe flows forth from the exclusive roots of Italian and Greek civilizations. It’s a partial account of the deep past, extremely ethnocentrist, and therefore more of a map of what early-nineteenth century German-speaking people happened to think about history than anything else. As Holger Berg puts it, the historiographical context was “decidedly German or, to be more accurate, Hanoverian”. Strass was working in a tradition of general history, also known as allgemeine Geschichte or historia universalis, which sought knowledge on a global scale. This ambitious universalism was true of most disciplines founded in the eighteenth century at the great English, French, and German institutions. Ideas about knowledge forged in this era are still the air we breathe. It is difficult to step outside of an idea like “science”, for example, to see what is constructed about a word like “scientific”. But, in Germany in particular, general history after 1760 aimed its efforts toward a “systematic” account of the past. When the English writer William Bell published his translation and expansion upon Strass’ ideas in 1810, he was astonished that “the image of a Stream should not have presented itself to anyone” previously working on historical diagrams. It had an inherent liveliness, in his opinion, which matched with our experience of time itself. “The expressions of gliding, and rolling on; or of the rapid current, applied to time, are equally familiar to us with those of long and short”, wrote Bell, referring to simpler, line-based charts. Moreover, water springs up, surges, and dwindles, making it an apt metaphor for the “rise and fall of empire”. Strass’ rivers may allow the past to snake and curl, but they are relentlessly focused on the progression of power, according to Bell. A people’s history this is not: [Strass’ chart’s] diversified power, likewise, of separating the various currents into subordinate branches, or of uniting them into one vast ocean of power; of dispersing them a second time, but still in such a manner that they are always ready under the guidance of some great conqueror to converge again into one point, tends to render the idea by its beauty more attractive, by its simplicity more perspicuous, and by its resemblance more consistent. Although Bell thought such diagrams livelier and more beautiful than a simple timeline, the accompanying images are peculiar-looking. The less saturated versions of the chart appear almost tuberous, the rivers bulging in the rhizomatic style of a root vegetable, like ginger. Édouard Hocquart produced a rather more stylish version of a similar view in his 1830 Panorama de l'Histoire Universelle. The typography is elegant, and the diagram plots a tasteful combination of pink, yellow, and various shades of green against slate. More garish, and even more striking, is an 1849 version of Strass’ diagram hand-colored in jewel tones by English publisher C. Smith & Son. Strass’ own writing shows how attempts to create universal systems can lead to idealization. In the introduction to his Handbuch der Weltgeschichte (1830), he romanticizes people from the past into a kind of homogenous spirit of history, a man whose being transforms alongside the technologies he lives amongst. Like his Strom der Zeiten charts, which charm the eye with their peculiarity, Strass’ portrait of an aristocratic Europe, whose chivalric values were withering, now seems more picturesque than analytical. His systematic analysis is rendered defunct, even bizarre, by the changing standards of information graphics and ongoing changes to the definition of the word “history”. If “streams of time” initially promised to widen the breadth of linear history — allowing it to meander across space as well as time — our modern-day eyes are perhaps drawn to the banks and blank spaces in these maps: the stories covered by the waters of their “universal” system.

public-domain-review

Apr 20, 2022

Jo Livingston

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:20.772108

sowerby-mineralogy

James Sowerby’s British Mineralogy (1802–17) Text by Elaine Ayers Mar 3, 2022 On December 13, 1795, a fifty-six-pound meteorite fell from the sky into an English quarry. Wondering if it had “come from some volcano in the Moon”, the landowner turned this lump of multi-colored minerals over to James Sowerby, a well-connected scientific illustrator and naturalist. Sowerby published an extensive account of what became known as the “Yorkshire Meteorite” in his five-part mineralogical handbook, inviting pushback from geologists who thought that including a “Phaëton from the heavens might seem absurd in a work on British Mineralogy”. Since the curious object contained substances commonly found within mines of the British Isles, Sowerby believed the meteorite belonged in a volume primarily devoted to more mundane earthbound subjects, such as table salt and oxygenized carbon. Comprised of more than four hundred vividly hand-colored engravings of various rocks, minerals, and compounds, British Mineralogy saw the Royal Academy-trained illustrator depart from his focus on botany toward non-living specimens. Pledging to leave “no stone unturned” in communicating to both laypeople — farmers, miners, and surveyors — and a growing class of gentlemanly mineralogists interested in theories of evolutionary transmutation, Sowerby tried to bridge ever-growing cleavages in geological communities during a time when the age of Earth was hotly disputed. Geologists adhering to “Volcanian” and “Neptunian” theories of planetary origin might, at long last, “shake hands together”, if provided with detailed illustrations of every known British “species” of rock and mineral. By referencing these dueling ideologies, which argued that the Earth was born either out of fiery eruption or biblical deluge, Sowerby positioned his work at the center of a debate that held enormous stakes far beyond the realm of geology. Catastrophism — the idea that the origins of Earth and the transmutation of species have been shaped by sudden, often violent events — dominated early-nineteenth century scientific debates about evolution and extinction. Embraced, by some, as a way of reconciling biblical beginnings with increasingly common discoveries of fossilized bones that pointed to a decidedly non-Christian view of the world, the set of layered theories attempted to integrate mass extinction with ongoing transmutation. Sowerby, who was deeply committed to public scholarship, refused to weigh in on the religious implication of his geological work, saving it for later texts on less “controversial” subjects. Seemingly circumspect in his own beliefs, Sowerby gestured towards, while never fully engaging with, profound conversations between science and religion. Despite his scientific leanings, James Sowerby was first and foremost an artist. From his intricately detailed accounts of fungi and shells to his 1809 A New Elucidation of Colour Theory (dedicated to none other than Isaac Newton), the naturalist was concerned with translating three-dimensional, colorful, and sometimes ephemeral objects to the flat surface of the page. Adept in describing and demonstrating how complex questions of perspective, scale, and color functioned in individual objects, Sowerby’s observational eyes and deft hands were remarkable for the time and continue to work as standards within scientific illustration. The illustrator’s rocks and minerals were, at once, geometric objects and geological proofs of the Earth’s age. By the 1830s, geologists had largely replaced catastrophic origin theories with “uniformitarian” ideas of gradual change. These ideas were most clearly articulated in geologist Charles Lyell’s enormously popular and oft-revised Principles of Geology, a scantily illustrated text that formed the sediments of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Sowerby, for his part, continued to add natural-historical specimens to his private collections while building a familial legacy of scientific collecting and illustration that lasted for generations. As Sowerby’s disciple John Mawe wrote in his public-facing Familiar Lessons on Mineralogy and Geology, the magic and mystery of mineralogy, from meteorite to table salt, lay in its multiple identities, spanning audiences and consumers. Rocks and minerals, in all of their mundanity, held beautiful and sublime lessons about the world for specialists and non-specialists alike — a beauty that Sowerby was devoted to capturing through illustration, and a beauty that continues to capture illustrators and designers more than two centuries later. Find below highlights of plates from all five volumes. You can see the first four volumes at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the full set at e-rara. Also check out this wonderful hand-copied selection from Sowerby's work made in 1840 by a woman named Martha Proby.

public-domain-review

Mar 3, 2022

Elaine Ayers

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:21.439309

a-true-and-wonderful-narrative

“A Sword was Seen in the Sky”: A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 27, 2022 We hear with the greatest Astonishment, that near Riga in Livonia, has been seen in the open Sky, a fiery Rod, which struck about it, and the Points of the Rod were full of blood. Four great Swords stood at the Stary Heaven, which very often vanished, and soon appeared again; they did strike together like Flashes of Fire round a House it was frightful to behold. Likewise was to be seen with Horror, a pretty large Coffin, which was covered with three Dead heads; also a Pyramid and Serpent. So opens the first of two accounts detailing unusual phenomena seen in the skies over Riga and Kirschberg (near Gdansk) in 1763. Published by Mannheim-born Philadelphia printer Anton Armbruster the following year, this short pamphlet was a translation of a German broadside titled Zwei wahrhafte von gantz besondrn Himmels–Zeichen. Why this translation for Philadelphia? Such strange news from Prussia would have likely appealed to the city's many German immigrants, but there was maybe more to Armbruster’s publication. Despite occurring across the other side of the world, such ominous signs from a wrathful God unhappy with a wayward populace, could speak to the citizens of the much-embattled Pennsylvania Province. The year of 1764 was a troubled time for Philadelphia. After Armbruster’s former business partner Benjamin Franklin had, in early February, turned back the Paxton Boys vigilante mob on their way to murder Susquehannock Indians, a pamphlet war broke out in the City of Brotherly Love. Nearly a quarter of the seventy-plus pamphlets either excoriating or apologizing for the Paxton gang’s violence were printed on the press owned by Benjamin Franklin and operated by Armbruster. Did the latter then take a break from the ongoing provincial war of words to issue a transcendental warning to Philadelphians? “These are the ForeBodings of the Creator, which go before Punishment”, a sky-born Youth in white proclaimed to the “Multitude” near Riga amid the thunderous lightning and apparitions of swords, snakes, and skulls. In the town of Kirschberg outside Gdansk, a three-day sail from Riga along the Baltic's southern shore, similar vengeful scenes were reported in the skies. For a full forty-eight hours the tempest’s fiery red clouds alternately closed and opened to reveal a cannon and swords, along with three angels enjoining citizens to quit their vice and unrighteousness or “GOD will punish you very quick.” The particular Himmels-Zeichen — heavenly signs — illustrated in Armbruster’s translated and reprinted jeremiad were typical of seventeenth and eighteenth-century apocalyptic broadsides. But they would soon be on the wane, thanks to philosophes like Franklin who were making great strides in replacing the old Aristotelian meteorologia — the study of things on high, generated by both the four elements and divine intelligences — into Meteorology, the nascent quantitative natural historical science of weather. With his research into lightning, waterspouts, whirlwinds, and other weather events in the 1750s, Franklin had done more than anyone else to engender the shift from miraculous celestial signs to the laws of the gaseous atmosphere. An avid practitioner of folk magic — especially the wildly popular divinatory pastime of “money digging” — Armbruster’s own allegiance lay squarely with the past. Stories were told of how the “Grand Master” (as he was known) had a “special charm for raising and laying the devil, and would frequently arise, at midnight, and spread out a large sheet of whimsical drawings which he possessed, and surround it with four or five candles.” In 1765, after a bitter election saw Franklin, a royal government advocate, tossed from the provincial assembly by disaffected German voters and while Pontiac’s War still raged on the western frontier, Armbruster published a broadside in German and English, An Account of a Surprising Phoenomenon, Which Appeared in the Sky at the City of Philadelphia and Different Parts of Pennsylvania, on Saturday the 2d. Of February 1765. Bearing a slightly reworked version of the 1764 woodcut, the broadside gave his own eyewitness account — “A Meteor appeared to the writer as if three armies were in conflict” — of the very local Himmels–Zeichen. Perhaps this time Armbruster’s prognostication was on the mark; just seven weeks after the “meteor” streaked through Philadelphia’s sky, the British Parliament and King George III issued the Stamp Act, setting in motion the events that would be known as the American Revolution.

public-domain-review

Apr 27, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:21.869010

ostentatio-genitalium

Ostentatio Genitalium in Renaissance Art Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 14, 2022 Ostentatio genitalium (the display of the genitals) refers to disparate traditions in Renaissance visual culture of attributing formal, thematic, and theological significance to the penis of Jesus. That these images seem to have been created in good faith, with pious intentions, mystifies art historians, and many refuse to recognize the category as noteworthy or distinct from the nudity of angels and putti. Yet, as examples accrue, the conspicuous attention lent to Christ’s phallus cannot escape even the most disinterested gaze. “It is no exaggeration to say that this has probably been the most taboo topic in Christian thought for two thousand years”, writes Stephen Sapp. In contrast to classical sculptural conventions, which — with exceptions like certain herma and statues of satyrs — often showcase male genitalia in a state of flaccid modesty (akin to Michelangelo’s Risen Christ), these Renaissance images shock us because they are so frequently ithyphallic: Christ has risen, but not in the way we have come to expect. Beginning around 1260 and enjoying widespread employment before finally tapering off in the seventeenth-century, ostentatio genitalium reversed a Byzantine tendency to depict Christ as sexless, his missing organs covered by flat, diaphanous veils. This was a symbol of purity and perfection, following from Augustinian notions that untimely erections are reminders of Adam’s “sin of disobedience”. Yet in the ostentatio genitalium tradition the opposite seems true: it is the visual virility of Christ that affirms his divinity. The natural question to ask, after blinking our eyes, would be why? How do practitioners of a religion, whose seven heavenly virtues include prudence and temperance, decide to venerate, for centuries, an apparently prurient vision of their savior? There are many theories for the question of origins. Some point to the growing influence of Franciscan devotion in the thirteenth century, which came with the slogan nudus nudum Christum sequi (“naked to follow the naked Christ”). Others place less emphasis on the reproductive organs and rather see this representation as part of the Renaissance trend toward anatomical naturalism. (This trend was occasionally taken to extremes, in art and in life: Pietro Aretino — the influential sixteenth-century Italian author charged his contemporaries to “consecrate special vigils and feast-days in its [the penis’] honour, and not enclose it in a scrap of cloth or silk”.) And it is tempting, in a period of European history where Greco-Roman civilization was “rediscovered”, to try and connect the representation of holy turgidity with pagan precursors: the Garden of Priapus, bacchanalian rites, Pan and his pastimes. Leo Steinberg, who coined “ostentatio genitalium” in his famously controversial study of the phenomenon (1983), thinks this last temptation is a misstep. Questions about the sexuality of Christ were not imported from the past, but emerged organically out of mystical queries concerning the Incarnation: when God emptied himself of divinity and assumed a mortal form. “Delivered from sin and shame”, writes Steinberg, “Christ’s sexual member bespeaks that aboriginal innocence which in Adam was lost.” Or rather, Christ’s perfection is capable of redeeming imagery more-often associated with temptation and vice than religious piety. Even more surprising than the content of these paintings is the fact that this theological symbolism was accessible to numerous engravers, painters, and audiences. It’s a surprise that speaks, perhaps, to a kind of oblivion: the modern world’s “massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity”, a context in which these images were once legible. For Steinberg, the ostentatio genitalium tradition trades on a “erection-resurrection equation”, which allowed a viewer to access the holy mystery of “mortified-vivified flesh”. We find a prominent example of this “equation” in several works by Dutch painter Maerten van Heemskerck with the title Man of Sorrows, which show a resurrected, stigmata-ridden Christ, whose loincloth reveals far more than it conceals. In images where fabric successfully clothes the Son of God, the proliferation of flowing material can become a charged substitute, such as in Wolf Huber’s Allegory of Salvation (ca. 1543), where a limp serpent hangs lifeless on a distant cross, while Christ’s perizoma plumes. The “discovery” of ostentatio genitalium has been admired and criticized by numerous scholars. One shortcoming in arguments seeking to prove the coherence of this genre arises from a lack of evidence: many artworks that might support the theory have been bowdlerized, with Christ’s body covered or modified in acts of iconoclasm and reformation. And while the images collected below all seem, with varying demands on the imagination, to highlight Jesus’ genitals, we will never be sure why. Caroline Walker Bynum, one of Steinberg’s most prolific interlocutors, cautions that acts and artworks which, for the twenty-first century viewer, seem singularly sexual, once had expanded, theological connotations. Consider, for instance, the late medieval tendency to depict Christ birthing [8] an allegorical figure of the church from a stigma between his ribs, as if the wound — created by his penetration by the Lance of Longinus — were connected to a womb. Or, as Bynum recounts, when Catherine of Siena had a vision of Christ using his foreskin as a wedding ring, “she associated that piece of bleeding flesh with the eucharistic host and saw herself appropriating the pain of Christ.” The communion with Christ’s body — an act erotic, Eucharistic, both, or more — offers a visual vocabulary that remains irreducible to any easy explanation.

public-domain-review

Apr 14, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:22.326616

nikola-tesla-in-his-laboratory

Earthen Messages: Nikola Tesla in his Laboratory (ca. 1899) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 29, 2022 It becomes more and more difficult to answer a neglected message as time ticks on. You have broken the circuit of communication, kept your correspondent in the lurch. Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, “the man who invented the twentieth century”, reignited his correspondence with friend and mentor William Crookes in an arresting way. On a photograph of himself seated beneath a giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing twenty-two-foot-long bolts of electricity, Tesla inscribed: “To my illustrious friend Sir William Crookes of whom I always think and whose kind letters I never answer!” Too busy to return letters, Tesla was hard at work making the medium obsolete. In “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, the 1900 Century Magazine article for which this double-exposure photograph was originally staged, the inventor describes how his “mind was dominated by the idea of effecting communication to any distance through the earth or environing medium”. Tesla had hit on the idea of a planetary messaging platform, for both tellurian and extraterrestrial recipients, which would consume decades of his life. Why fuss with laying telegraph cables (or power lines) if the earth itself could deliver electrical signals of varying strengths to a specific addressee? The Century photograph marks a period of cultivated publicity in Tesla’s life. Having outgrown his New York laboratory, which, according to biographer Marc Seiffer, was “vulnerable to fires and potential spies”, the Serbian-American electrician decamped for Colorado Springs. Here he had previously created “hyperbolic headlines” by successfully transmitting the ballad “Ben Bolt” between two earth-connected autoharps, leading the public to believe he knew how to tap a power reserve within the planet’s mantle. In Colorado, he would build a research center at the invitation of attorney Leonard E. Curtis, who had supported Tesla during the “war of the currents”: when Thomas Edison’s DC power was pitted against George Westinghouse, the licensee of Tesla’s patents for alternating current (AC). Before leaving New York, Tesla publicized his new research departure in Electrical Review, where he was shown holding a 1,500 candlepower lightbulb — wirelessly powered by a version of his eponymous coil — apologizing to the reader “for the frequent appearance of my likeness in these photographs, which is distasteful to me, but was unavoidable”. Unavoidable and strategic: Tesla needed support for an oscillator strong enough to “talk to the inhabitants of the planet Mars”, a technology that would hopefully allow him to realize “one of my fondest dreams; namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wire”. Soon after, thanks to free electricity from the El Paso Electric Company, he would indeed intercept what he believed to be Martian communication — the letter “S” in Morse code — which happened to be the same message Guglielmo Marconi was broadcasting during contemporaneous radio experiments between England and France. In the 1890s, when Tesla began to conceive of a “World Wireless System”, the air crackled with voice. Cordless communication was a hallmark of the future, and the future seemed to be speaking itself into existence. While Marconi increased the range of his radio broadcasts exponentially during the decade, borrowing generously from Tesla’s own research, both men had wireless precursors. During the 1860s, the dentist-inventor Mahlon Loomis is thought to have sent an electrical current between two kites flying eighteen miles apart, while Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone in 1880. A precursor to fiber optics, the device relied upon sunlight to transmit audio. “I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!” Bell told his father after the breakthrough, announcing, to his wife Mabel’s chagrin, an interest in naming their second daughter “Photophone” in celebration. Reliant on light, however, Bell and Tainer’s system suffered a communications blackout at each day’s dusk. While Bell and Tainter focused on sunlit communication, Tesla was trying to rewire Earth’s relationship to the solar system. Like James Clerk Maxwell’s “demon”, he sought to overcome the second law of thermodynamics. “Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall return”, Tesla writes in “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, the subtitle of which promises “special reference to the harnessing of the sun’s energy”. He composed his speculative treatise after a commission by Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century, who begged him “not to write a metaphysical article, but rather an informative one”, and sent Dickenson V. Alley to Colorado to take promotional photographs. The photographs served their intended purpose, illustrating a twelve-thousand-word essay where Tesla did everything but shy away from metaphysics. In order to combat the inevitability of entropy, he offers various visions of the future: global demilitarization through a version of mutually assured destruction, the liberation of humans from their reliance on food, and a theory resembling the many-worlds interpretation. Along the way, Tesla champions wind and solar power as superior to coal, dreams of machines powered solely by gravity and frictionless engines. At the center of his future is a device related to the “magnifying transmitter”, which would be capable of wirelessly powering appliances around the world, using the earth’s resonance to amplify energy created from renewable sources like waterfalls: Export of power would then become the chief source of income for many happily situated countries. . . . Men could settle down anywhere, fertilize and irrigate the soil with little effort, and convert barren deserts into gardens, and thus the entire globe could be transformed and made a fitter abode for mankind. Despite the metaphysics, or, indeed, because of them, this article and its photographs galvanized public opinion. A year after its publication, Tesla would begin to build the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island, thanks to funding from J. P. Morgan. Here he carried out experiments related to wireless power and theorized about building a mysterious “teleforce” energy weapon. For scientific, financial, and personal reasons, he never realized his vision of large-scale wireless power, but, as evidenced by — among countless other examples — the automotive company that bears his name, inventors continue to try and reply to the open letter that Tesla sent into the future.

public-domain-review

Mar 29, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:22.815486

cabala-spiegel

A Hall of Mirrors: Cabala, Spiegel Der Kunst Und Natur, In Alchymia (1615) Text by Kevin Dann Mar 15, 2022 Featuring four alchemical engravings by Raphael Custos — much reproduced since Carl Jung included the third as “The Mountain of the Adepts” in Psychology and Alchemy (1968) — Cabala’s leading symbol is the looking glass, which the author offers as a tool for penetrating the mysteries of alchemy and divinity. The century spanning from 1550 to 1650 saw the publication of hundreds of books with “Speculum”, “Spiegel”, and “Mirror” in their titles, a testament to the technology’s immense power over the European imagination. As Urszula Szulakowska describes, a belief emerged during this period that “pictures drawn according to the single-point perspective system could become a type of magical mirror”. To help its readers commune with God, the “celestial looking glass”, Cabala offers three graphical “mirrors” in the form of perspectival images rich with hermetic symbolism — a “Beginning” of “sapphire”, a “Middle” of “pure steel”, and an “End”, “sprung out of these two [preceding images] perfectly”. Prefacing this sequence, we find an engraving divided into three panels, titled “Mirror of Art and Nature”, offering a glimpse of the alchemical journey that is to follow. “Beginning: Exaltation” bears the armorial cabala in the general sense of a path of wisdom, not any reference to the explicitly Jewish mystical technique. A fire-breathing chimera is encircled by a Latin alchemical A-to-Z and zodiacal foursomes. Framed by the Paracelsian tria prima of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury, a Raven, Peacock, and Phoenix rise toward the Sun — the Philosopher’s Stone of union with the Divine. Arranged to correspond with their zodiacal rulerships, the personifications of the six other planets in “Middle: Conjunction” ascend toward Mercury, the goal of both the blindfolded gentleman and the fellow chasing the hare. Topped by this same caduceus-bearing Mercury, Cabala’s final scene, “End: Multiplication”, depicts the resurrected Christ offering the Water of Life to King/Sun and Queen/Moon, while Peg-leg Saturn and his fellow planets wave their bellows from below, and the halo-bearing dove of the Holy Spirit flies between the walled city of Jerusalem (right), the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew JHVH, upper left), and Christ, the Fountain of Life. Published the next year in Latin as Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia (1616), this translated edition contains a dedication to the Rosicrucians, absent from the German text, explicitly unveiling an inspiration behind the work. Cabala came into the world in the wake of Fama fraternitatis, a Rosicrucian manifesto whose appearance in 1614 led to hundreds of tracts either lauding or condemning its anonymous author’s call for the universal reformation of mankind. Following Cabala’s “Declaration of the most ancient stone instead of an Epilogue”, a succinct and comprehensive Paracelsian discourse is offered by the “Anonymous philosopher dedicated to the fraternity”, i.e., the brotherhood of Rosicrucians. Signed “paVLVS” in the cryptic manner characteristic of the brethren named in Rosicrucian tracts, the Roman numerals seem a simple — yet indecipherable — puzzle. The alchemical Discursus brevior that closes Cabala appears in only one other place: a 1615 Magdeburg text that gathers the Fama and Confessio with a suite of other writings, making it the largest of all the Rosicrucian manifestos. The anonymous creator of Cabala seems to have folded this discursus into his work, for they are exactly the same. Cabala is often attributed to the Augsburg publisher Stephan Michelspacher. Yet the only part of Cabala’s text explicitly claimed by Michelspacher is a fawning prefatory apology to Ulm doctor Johannes Remmelin for having pirated his anatomical flapbook Catoptrum Microcosmicum (1613). Cabala’s actual author remains as elusive as “Father C.R.C.” (Christian Rosenkreutz), the legendary founder of Rosicrucianism. A possible candidate for the conception and execution of Cabala is Augsburg Paracelsian physician, collector and copyist Karl Widemann, who was, through his close association with Rosicrucian champion Adam Haslmayr, deeply imbedded in the still uncircumscribed constellation of individuals who brought both the Fama fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) into public circulation. Widely recognized as the most indefatigable collector and interpreter of Paracelsus’ original writings, there was no other person in Europe who had access to as rich a trove of Paracelsian work, and, through his friendship with Haslmayr, unfettered access also to the highly charged original writings of the Rosicrucians. Perhaps there remains some undetected speculum that will one day bring him or another mercurial brother of the Rosy Cross to light as Cabala’s true author.

public-domain-review

Mar 15, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:23.286207

sola-busca

A Renaissance Riddle: The Sola Busca Tarot Deck (1491) Text by Kevin Dann Feb 3, 2022 The Latin motto TRAHOR FATIS (I am drawn by Fate) appears but four times in the Tarot masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, the Sola Busca deck, and yet it hangs unmistakably over the cards’ entire colorful procession of ancient Greek and Roman heroes. Armored in the style of late-fifteenth century northern Italy, they bear bagpipes, shields, lyres, pennants, staffs, and torches, while accompanied by basilisks, crows, falcons, doves, and eagles. Every single card is a miniature drama — the expressions of the highly individualized figures inviting us to speculate, like the Tarot itself, on the past and future of this cryptic world. When the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage in Milan purchased the Sola Busca tarot deck in 2009, it had existed for five hundred years, and yet had barely ever been seen — a very strange thing for a deck of playing cards. Before a spate of studies appeared in Italian after 1990, it had only been written about three times: by Count Leopold Cicognara in Memoirs to Serve the History of Intaglio Printing (1831); by William Hughes Willshire in A Description of Playing and Other Cards (1876); and in 1935, when British Museum art historian Arthur Mayger Hind’s Early Italian Engravings advanced the first hypothesis about the origin of the deck and its author. Although still hotly debated, the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the Sola Busca deck — now housed at the Pinacoteca de Brera — was engraved in 1491, most likely in Ferrara, and was colored by hand about a decade later, in Venice. (Other versions of this deck exist in fragmented, unpainted form, preserved by the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum, and elsewhere.) Considered the oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot deck in existence, the Sola Busca — named for the family of Milanese nobles who owned it for some five generations — was the first to be produced using copperplate engraving. It is also the earliest known tarot deck that illustrates the Major and Minor Trumps in the way that has become the standard, with characters and objects depicting allegorical scenes. In the Renaissance era this would have been revolutionary, while, today, some of these cards may seem familiar. In 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman–Smith to illustrate his The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), she drew inspiration — and for nearly a dozen cards, the exact imagery — from the Sola Busca deck, black-and-white photographs of which were exhibited at the British Museum in 1908. The genius of the Tarot is its multivocality, its ability to convey manifold meanings independent of the interrogator. Shorn from the historical, mythological, and pictorial associations that would have been available to its users in fifteenth-century Venice or Ferrara, the Sola Busca deck is limited in its use for divinatory purposes today, and yet, since its enigmatic imagery irresistibly invites decoding, the deck nonetheless beckons twenty-first century cartomancers into a game of high imagination. Online Tarot forums host the most ingeniously freewheeling speculation about the Sola Busca’s sources and meanings, while the scholarly interpretations continue to be tentative and provisional, offering space for amateurs to make their own discoveries. In talismanic publisher Scarlet Imprint’s The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi (2017), Peter Mark Adams proposes a baroque hypothesis that the Sola Busca deck was a dark grimoire to aid the black magical operations of a secret Venetian elite cabal. Some believe that Nicola di Maestro Antonio d'Ancona, “one of the most eccentric painters of the Renaissance”, may have been the artist behind the Sola Busca deck, although “the arguments are not entirely convincing”. Beyond the mystery of their creator lie the many puzzles embedded in these cards. Why does Alexander the Great (King of Swords) figure so largely in this deck? Is the “M.S.” on the Aces referring to Marin Sanudo, consigliere to the aristocratic Ferrrara D’Este family? Is Catone (XIII) a reference to Cato the Younger, who conquered Cyprus in 58 BCE, and thus an allusion to Venice’s annexation of Cyprus in 1489, two years before the deck’s creation? Whenever the TRAHOR FATIS inscription appears, it is accompanied by a seven–pointed “bearded” star (pogonius), raining influence toward Earth and its denizens. Is this the malefic Caput Algol in the head of the Medusa? Or the Great Comet of 1472? The fatis of the Tarot, and particularly of this magnificent work of Renaissance art, truly remains “in the stars”, pulling us fatefully toward its endless riddles. Below you can browse the complete Trump suit as well as selections from the Cups, Coins, Wands, and Swords.

public-domain-review

Feb 3, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:23.596172

cycling-art

Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion (1889) Text by Kevin Dann and Hunter Dukes Mar 9, 2022 Innovations in transportation are “the most powerful factor in the evolution of man”, wrote the inventor and industrialist Robert Pittis Scott in the introduction to his treatise on bicycles, tricycles, and man-motor carriages. He proceeds to quote a “great”, though unnamed, “genius”, who suspects that a day will come when human limbs will “shrivel and drop off”, “being entirely dispensed with in the art of moving and manipulating matter”. And yet, in 1889, cycling heavily taxed the limbs rather than relaxing them to the point of atrophy. This was about to change for the better thanks to the recent development of the first practical inflatable tire by John Boyd Dunlop. While Scott thought the technology “one of the grandest ideas in the way of anti-vibration”, he also aired some doubts over its predilection for “cutting and collapsing” and seemed more enthused by the possibility of a flexible rim which simply buckled its way over obstacles. Scott peered into the future, and narrowly missed laying claim to it, with his predictions about the Safety bicycle, which sported a rear-mounted chain drive, ball-bearing hubs, a steel frame, and equal size wheels — many of the features now common across cruisers and ten-speeds. Though the initial hundred pages of his book take the high-wheeled Ordinary or “penny-farthing” as standard, Scott was one of the first Americans to sense the potential of a rear-driven design. A millionaire manufacturer of iron fruit-paring devices, Scott had made the overseas journey to Coventry, the world’s leading bicycle-manufacturing city, to commission a custom two-wheeler, which — he would discover with frustration — almost exactly matched the specifications of England's newly unveiled Starley Rover, the first mass-produced Safety bicycle. At a time when British and American physicians published dire warnings about bicycles causing hernias, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and “urethral stricture”, Scott reassured his readers that they merely needed to choose the right saddle and suspension springs to keep their spine and pelvic anatomy intact. He championed women’s adoption of the new sport, arguing that “less seraphic and more muscular tissue tends to make us all happier”. As springy as a Brooks saddle on Dunlop tires, Scott’s prose is delightful even when taking up the biomechanics of machine and rider, but it reaches empyrean heights in the book’s second half, which is prefaced by a hysterical self-deprecating account of his own patent application tribulations. Scott arrives on an honest algorithm for hobbyists who misunderstand the mathematics of invention: Scale of proportional genius required for each department in benefiting mankind (and yourself) by means of invention: 2%, inventing; 7%, getting into shape; 3%, getting American patent; .01%, getting English patent; 10% getting patent through court; 28%, getting the money; 49.99%, keeping it after you get it. Part II’s whimsical and illustrated tour through the previous century of “man-motor locomotion” pairs technical drawings and brief texts from patent applications with satiric running heads and humorous single sentence reviews of a wild peloton of wheeled contraptions, including: “A Machine-Shop on Wheels”, “Rig-a-Jig-Jig and Away We Go”, “The Power Never Ceases”, “My Kingdom for a Horse”, and “Said Not to Tumble Over”. The book concludes with Colorado machinist Reuben Jasper Spalding’s Da Vinci-esque “Improved Flying-Machine” (Patent #396,984) — christened “The Coming Man” by the author. Scott too spent years experimenting with airships, before training his eye on pneumatic tires. . . for automobiles.

public-domain-review

Mar 9, 2022

Kevin Dann and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:24.096972

bruegel-big-fish-little-fish

Bruegel the Elder’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556) Text by Paloma Ruiz Mar 1, 2022 Pieter Bruegel’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish depicts a surreal, cannibalistic feeding frenzy on the waterfront: an unfortunate turn of events for a father-son fishing trip. A fearsomely large fish has been heaved upon the beach. From its gaping mouth, as well as a gash being carved in its midsection, spill forth two torrents of seemingly ravenous marine life. On land and at sea, sizable fish flounder after their inferiors, while eels chase eels, and some become meals for an assortment of predatory mollusks. The Flemish description below this scene, which appears in Pieter van der Heyden’s 1557 engraving, puts a colloquial spin on a popular proverb: “Look son, I have long known that the big fish eat the small.” And aboard their shared boat, the boy gestures to the madness in tandem with his father, their arms perfectly framing the isolated word of Latin: ecce. Behold. Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569) produced the model for Big Fish Eat Little Fish in 1556, creating an intricately textured illustration via gray and black ink atop paper. At the same time, the business of printmaking was beginning to hit its stride throughout Europe, and became particularly popular in Bruegel’s adopted home of Antwerp. This movement towards increased print production was led in large part by Bruegel’s long-time publisher, Hieronymus Cock, whose influence likely led the Netherlandish artist to develop an interest in engravings. Bruegel’s drawn version of Big Fish Eat Little Fish is thought to have been created with the intent to guide an engraver’s hand — evidenced by the immaculate attention to depth. The water is carefully striated; the creature’s back stippled to form a soft gradation. Bruegel's illustration was ultimately engraved in copper by Van der Heyden, who followed the drawing with technical prowess. Van der Heyden’s monogram can be found in the lower left-hand corner, across from the publisher mark, “Cock. EXCV. 1557”. And just above the father’s dormant oar, as though left to ornament the sand, are the words: “Hieronymus Bosch inventor”. Oddly, Bosch passed away in 1516, meaning that Cock most likely used his name for its widespread marketability, or as an homage to his obvious influence on Bruegel. The human-size fish who has suddenly sprung legs and two slippered feet, plodding away with a smaller fish in his mouth, is a clear echo of Bosch’s artistry. The works of Bruegel often feature scenes of peasant lives, poised to represent various ancient proverbs. In his depiction of chaotic consumption through Big Fish Eat Little Fish, the lesson of large fish devouring their miniatures might relate to a general sense of injustice, the feeling that predation is innately born and instinctive. The wealthy exploit the impoverished; the powerful pummel the weak. This saying may owe its popularity to Erasmus’ Adagia, a compilation of Greek and Latin proverbs assembled in the early sixteenth-century, which includes: “Serpens ni edat serpentem, draco non fiet” (A serpent, unless it devours a serpent, will not become a dragon). Yet while Erasmus may have played a role in cementing the proverb within a popular canon, the observation of same-species predation can be traced all the way back to Aristotle’s History of the Animals. Here, Aristotle notes that, “As a general rule the larger fishes catch the smaller ones in their mouths”, and “all fishes devour their own species, with the single exception of the cestreus or mullet”. This history includes myriad descriptions of marine diets, including the hierarchy of eels and crawfish, and the carnivorous tendencies of certain mollusks, like the giant clam clamped down on a fish’s back in Bruegel’s image. Given that Cock’s publishing company, Aux Quatre Vents, was primarily directed towards a well-educated crowd, the proverb within Big Fish Eat Little Fish would have been easily recognized and understood. In spite of this, the engraving became a source for various adaptations over time. A later version was printed by Ioan Galle in the mid-1600s, and saw the addition of several explanatory texts. Above the image sits the trilingual phrase: “The oppression of the poor. The rich suppress you with their power. Letter of James, 2:6”. Perhaps the most explicitly political adaptation, however, was released by an anonymous engraver ca. 1619, transforming the proverb into targeted critique. The artist has clearly labeled each facet of the image, most significantly tagging the enormous fish as “Barnevelsche Monster”, a reference to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, a controversial former Chancellor of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. His body is being swiftly executed by the labeled “knife of righteousness”, a weapon wielded by Maurice of Orange, Oldenbarnevelt’s eventual political enemy. Here, the attacker’s head is tilted upwards to reveal his face, in contrast to the original engravings that left him hidden behind his hat. Each of the fish spilling out of Oldenbarnevelt’s wounded body are named as leading men of the Dutch States Party, a republican political faction which stood for provincial sovereignty. An aquatic-avian hybrid remains in flight above the satirical tableau, but now boasts two small horns. And the child’s once awe-stricken ecce is suddenly imbued with undeniable socio-political significance. What does it mean to sit back and simply “behold”?

public-domain-review

Mar 1, 2022

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:24.549507

luyken-osteologia

Jan Luyken’s Frontispiece for Osteologia (1680) Text by Hunter Dukes May 3, 2022 “To bear a name is both terrible and necessary”, laments one of Don DeLillo’s characters, addressing the double-bind of linguistic existence. Novelists, poets, and philosophers have long been drawn to Adam when thinking about the generative magic of language and its potential devastation. In Genesis, God sculpts the beasts of the field from earthen elements, marching them before the first man, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”. For centuries, this scene has been imagined by artists as a stately procession — the recently formed fauna patiently awaiting their designation. Yet just as God conjured these creatures out of a timeless void, terminating their eternal sleep, so too Adam’s actions are at once creative and destructive: he births animals into language, while, in Hegel’s words, “nullifying them as beings of their own account”. Parroting the German philosopher, Maurice Blanchot describes how: “God had created all living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared”. This frontispiece etching, printed by Jan Luyken for Cornelis van Dyk’s Osteologia (1680), seems to speak to the consequences of Adam’s naming as imagined by Hegel and Blanchot. The animals are bare-bones, stripped of life’s flesh, and summoned toward a skeletal figure — Adam? Noah? St Peter? Van Dyk? — who reads off his list. In the foreground, a ledgered turtle, hedgehog, rabbit, dog, horse, and camel march toward their exit stage right. Where are they headed? Is there some paradise beyond, where their tissue will be restored? Where these creatures will no longer carry the burden of humanity’s taxonomical projects, like the fowls who labor to bear the banner text in the image’s leafless trees? Unlikely, even though the list’s alphabetic letters decay into an asemic scribble, as if language begins to falter in the face of a seemingly infinite parade of animal life. Rather, viewed in retrospect, this image appears to foretell the ceaseless march of scientific progress, and the Enlightenment’s mission to give order to the natural world. A vanguard of this mission, Van Dyk’s seventeenth-century study of bones begins with a discussion of Genesis. The natural scientist speculates if Adam was a “hermaphrodite”, due to his apparently parthenogenetic powers — making Eve from his own body, who he also names — before proceeding to dissect the pictured animals in search of their osteo-logical innards.

public-domain-review

May 3, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:25.039524

sport-in-art

William Baillie-Grohman’s Sport in Art (1913) Oct 27, 2021 “Sport in Art” commences with the fifteenth century, just previous to the invention of printing, and ends with the French Revolution, thus taking in the four centuries that are as vital to the history of venery as they are to that of art. So explains William Baillie-Grohman (1851–1921) in the preface to his 1913 book Sport in Art: An Iconography of Sport, which includes a grand total of 243 illustrations — two in colour, the rest in black-and-white. A warning for tender-hearted readers: here “sport” means the pursuit and killing of animals, though this encyclopedic tome enfolds other topics too. You will learn, for instance, what jolly song was sung while the seventeenth-century Duke of Coburg used his “waidblatt” (game knife) to spank the buttocks of an etiquette-lacking huntsman, laid across the corpse of a stag: “Jo, Jo, ha, ho ! this is for the King, princes and lords!” The English-Austrian author was raised in Tyrol, where he honed his hunting and mountaineering abilities before moving abroad. Baillie-Grohman found a welcome new landscape in the Rockies of North America and settled in British Columbia during the 1880s, where he invested in canal and land development. While the author produced various articles and books on hunting practices in both of these stomping grounds, Sport in Art remains his tour de force. As evidenced by some of the earliest human cave paintings, art and hunting have long entwined. Baillie-Grohman claims that, “as hunting was made the subject of the earliest pictorial designs, hunters can rightly claim to have given the first impulse to art”. The author himself certainly combines intimate knowledge of the two spheres. The illustrations presented range from Gaston de Foix’s La livre de chasse, ca. 1440; through Edward of Norwich’s mid-fifteenth century The Master of Game; to Horace Bénédict de Saussure’s Alpine hunts during his ascent of Mont Blanc, illustrated in 1790. Along the way, Baillie-Grohman presents works by Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Le Moyne, and a flock of lesser-known others. Baillie-Grohman does not limit himself to straight-forward representations. He understands that hunting is at once an allegorical and visceral pursuit (see Hendrik Goltzius’ The Hunt after Wealth below). He also includes material pertaining to the wider world of hunting: an emblem showing the brands on hounds; a certificate of indenture for a hunt apprentice; a page from Emperor Charles VI’s diary, detailing a day’s take in 1732; and an extraordinary engraved brass hunting calendar, for keeping track of the bag. The great range of images is intercut with knowledgeable discussion of the activities at hand. Not that the author always approves: fox-tossing is described as “A still worse instance of decadent sport”. Indeed, many might see this sentiment aptly applied to much of the hunting pursuits covered which, alongside more familiar prey, include the killing of otters, wolves, bears, and bison. Still, despite the bloodlust and destruction of life that sits at its core, the book remains a fascinating reminder of the importance and popularity that hunting has held, not only in the workings of society at large but in the confines of the artist’s studio too.

public-domain-review

Oct 27, 2021

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:25.978400

atlas-des-champignons

Lithographs from M. E. Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons (1827) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 12, 2021 With the last sights of summer having now vanished for many in Europe and North America, you may find, among fallen leaves and soggy mulch, mushrooms erupting overnight. We present here lithographs by A. Cornillon from Michel Étienne Descourtilz’s Atlas des champignons: comestibles, suspects et vénéneux (Atlas of mushrooms: edible, suspect and poisonous). There are the somewhat tasteless specimens familiar from supermarket shelves, as well as rarer varietes: the chanterelles, displayed at giant scale, look particularly tempting, while a lovely orange lion’s mane appears like a bearded god with his hat pulled low. The “suspect” mushrooms feature common lookalikes. Fly agaric, for example, can resemble edible species of blushers (in the Agaricomycetes class). The latter mushrooms do well in a cream sauce; consumption of the former results in an unpredictable cocktail of symptoms — hallucinations, euphoria, and nausea, if lucky, seizures and coma, if not. The toxic toadstools speak for themselves and highlight the danger of mushroom hunting without adequate knowledge: 2020 saw hundreds poisoned in France due to misidentification. On the topic of danger, Descourtilz himself led a curious life, working as a physician, botanist, and inadvertent historiographer of the Haitian Revolution. His 1809 Voyages d’un naturaliste chronicles, among other adventures, a trip from France to Haiti in 1799 in order to secure his family’s plantations. Despite having been issued a passport, he was arrested soon after his arrival by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, under Toussaint Louverture’s command, and only escaped death due to his medical training and the intervention of Mme Dessalines, the later Empress of Haiti: Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur. He spent four years in Haiti, serving against his will as a physician to the revolutionary forces. While he “was mindful to behave in a manner appropriate to the new economic and racial order”, writes Philippe R. Girard, Descoutilz remained highly critical of independence and in support of reconquest. For subsequent historians, Descourtilz’s observation of Toussaint offers a glimpse of the revolutionary leader’s writing practices and complex use of secretaries. But Descourtilz maintains a somewhat abrasive tone throughout his travelogue. “Profoundly self-centered”, writes Jeremy D. Popkin, “Descourtilz judged those he encountered largely in terms of how they treated him personally”. He returned to France with his worldview largely unchanged — eager to practice medicine and seek out mushrooms.

public-domain-review

Oct 12, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:26.441079

schmidt-diatoms

Adolf Schmidt’s Atlas der Diatomaceenkunde (1890) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 29, 2021 “Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass”, write the editors of the North American diatom society. Unicellular organisms that sometimes form colonies, these plankton have a siliceous skeleton known as a frustule, and thrive everywhere, in any type of water: saline, brackish, or fresh. The scale of diatoms varies widely, as does their geometry. Some are about three micrometers in diameter, others are almost visible to the unassisted eye. Some are circular with spines resembling “Martian antennae”, writes Mary Ann Tiffany and Stephen S. Nagy in a book chapter about “The Beauty of Diatoms”, others sport “a fringe-like skirt”. Accordingly, researchers seem to always have a favorite specimen, from an aesthetic point of view, and nineteenth-century enthusiasts went so far as to arrange ornamental slides of diatoms, a practice still in existence today. For the German natural scientist and clergyman Adolf Schmidt (1812–1899), who edited the catalogue in which the images below first appeared, the most beautiful diatom was Melosira, which looks like a caterpillar, composed of filamentous cells. While diatoms helped create the conditions for animal life, and continue to account for twenty percent of the photosynthesis that occurs on earth, they were not observed by humans until relatively recently. Scholars think the first reference to diatoms comes from a 1703 contribution to Philosophical Transactions by an unknown Englishman. Using a crude microscope to examine the roots of duckweeds, the man “saw adhering to them (and sometimes separate in the water) many pretty branches, compos’d of rectangular oblongs and exact squares”. In accordance with the principle of “multiple discovery” or “simultaneous invention”, it seems that the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek may have observed diatoms on Christmas day, the previous year, while gazing at the same kind of roots — though he believed the shapes to be animalcules, a term previously coined for the microorganisms he had glimpsed in rainwater. Almost immediately these tiny algae started causing trouble. According to prevailing theories of eighteenth-century biological classification, plants were not supposed to move, suggesting that diatoms were indeed minuscule animals. (We now know that diatoms are non-motile, capable only of “limited movement along a substrate by secretion of mucilaginous material along a slit-like groove or channel called a raphe”.) Advances in microscopy during the nineteenth century allowed for better observation and classification of diatoms the world over, leading to illustrations by Astrid Cleve-Euler, P. T. Cleve, Christian Gottfied Ehrenberg, Albert Grunow, Henri Ferdinand Van Heurck, and Adolph Schmidt. The first instalment of Schmidt’s Atlas appeared in 1874, in collaboration with Gründler, Grunow, Janesch, Weissflog, and Witt, and was frequently updated with contributions by other colleagues thereafter, until the final edition in 1959. While these illustrations from the catalogue are not as aestheticized as Ernst Haeckel’s depiction of diatoms in Kunstformen der Natur (1904), and lack the color of more modern diatom images, their contribution to the history of science cannot be overstated. Deeming the Atlas “world-famous” and “gigantic”, a group of scientists researching the nanotechnological possibilities of diatoms believe that Schmidt “should be given the honour due to him” by calling the researcher by his clerical title: “‘the Archidiaconus [archdeacon] Schmidt’ — certainly the most impressive title a diatomist could have”. Featured below are images from an 1890 edition of Schmidt's Atlas, a compilation missing plates 1 to 80 but printed in a most striking blue. We are not quite sure how its pages have ended up with such a hue — perhaps the result of a type of early photocopying? While the diatoms seem at ease in this aqueous pallet, you can also view more traditional printings of the plates here.

public-domain-review

Sep 29, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:26.911674

the-letter-h

Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 9, 2021 In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a fictional linguist describes a phonetic endemic: missed employment opportunities due to the connotations of a person’s accent. Addressing the “many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue”, the professor insists that “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first”. Shaw’s wit shows through in the near homonym: aspirations of social mobility, in this period, often included pronunciationary emulation — the breathy aitch sounds of aspirated consonants. Alfred Leach, who Steven Connor, in Beyond Words, calls one of the “doughiest defenders of the h”, believed that English’s aspirated aitch (or rather, haitch) signaled a direct inheritance from Classical antiquity. In the pronounced h of words like “herb” — notably lacking from American English — he heard the “spiritus asper” of Hellenism. Leach was writing in a period when linguists began reflecting on the shifting history of aspirates and the role they played in indicating status, class, and education. These traits continue into our present day. The historian of language Henry Hitchings, whose own name is uncannily reminiscent of Shaw’s Henry Higgins, argues that the pronunciation of this letter is “still a significant shibboleth”, and quotes Leach’s contemporary, Oxford scholar Henry Sweet, who called it “an almost infallible test of education and refinement”. Why so much huffing about the letter H? Throughout the nineteenth century, this aspirated sound was on the rise. At the end of the previous century, Received Pronunciation (RP) became known as the accent of aristocracy, leading to aspirational elocution guides like Poor Letter H (1854). While words like “hotel” had once been pronounced in the French style (oh-tell), English speakers had begun to exhale audibly, as if yawning at the continued Norman influence on British tongues. Leach led the charge against “English Grammarians” who “conspired to withhold from us the means of propitiating this demon Aspirate”. In The Letter H, he ridicules those he calls “H-droppers”, speakers whose phonetic errors seem to snowball: “lost H’s have a knack of turning up in wrong places, when they return at all”. Leach is prone to hyperbole — “the early aspirative labours of a converted H-dropper give birth to monstrosities” — and sneers at Cockney speech: “Horkney hoysters, ‘amshire ‘am, and ‘am and heggs”. To tell his story correctly, the linguist lapses orthographic, going back to the H’s origin in Egyptian and Phoenician characters. Working his way up to the present, Leach proclaims that “the modern English H is an important embellishment, and adds immensely to the strength and pleasing effect of speech”. At times, in this book, the H seems semi-animate. It’s “an earnest letter” and brings excitement into the language: “Ho! Ha! Hollo! Hurrah! Hang it!”. Leach ends his surprisingly captivating linguistic treatise by waxing maudlin. “Any letter doomed to die out of a word or a language, generally attempts to depart gracefully by first acquiring the nature of an aspirate-consonant, and then turns into a perfect H; under this form it relies upon h-dropping mortals to give it quiet burial, and unobtrusively confide it to Oblivion.” Markedly grumpy, Leach may have found himself hopeful had he heard the aspirated h humming along in our language today.

public-domain-review

Nov 9, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:27.343646

zanzibar-tales

Zanzibar Tales (1901) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 22, 2021 Folktales from the Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania bear traces of the centuries during which the islands served as a center for trade in the Indian ocean, the complex history of intracontinental cultural exchange on the East African coast, and the influence of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit stories on Swahili narratives. As such, it is difficult to reconstruct the history of these tales. (An 1894 German translation of similar stories wondered if they “were told already in Noah’s ark”.) Presented here are ten stories adapted by George W. Bateman, which some claim inspired Disney’s Bambi and The Lion King, although we have been unable to find the resemblance. On the subject of animals, many of the stories feature creatures playing archetypal roles. “The Hare and the Lion”, for instance, sits somewhere between the story as it is told in the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra and its Persian adaptations, Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and hare, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Grimms’ Little Red Cap. In this folktale, Soongoora, the hare, finds a calabash tree full of honeybees and recruits the big rat named Bookoo with a lie. “My father has died, and has left me a hive of honey. I would like you to come and help me eat it.” After smoking out the hive, they begin to feast, but the lion who owns the honey, Simba, camps out at the tree’s base. The hare throws himself to the lion, disguised as a bundle of straw, leaving Simba a honey-stuffed rat for his supper. Three days later, Soongoora plays the same trick on Kobay, the cautious tortoise. The story ends with Simba hidden inside Soongoora’s warren, waiting to ambush him and his wife. But the wily hare, seeing paw marks, sprints away, and the lion, exhausted, returns to his tree, giving up any hope of revenge. (Simba gets off easy: in the next tale, after the lion gets his head stuck in a cave, a rabbit eats his rear then annexes his farm.) Aside from nonhuman protagonists, we also meet: a fatherless huntsman in training, who, after trapping animals, lets them go and is rewarded with silver and gold; a magician who trains the sultan’s children to be great scholars, keeps one for himself, and eventually gets boiled alive in a pot of stew; and the son of a great physician, who, to follow in his father’s lineage, must confront the king of snakes. Not much is known about George W. Bateman, who translated these tales from Swahili. He was working in the intellectual shadow of the colonial bishop Edward Steere, author of Swahili Tales, As Told by Natives of Zanzibar (1870). Unlike Steere — who once wrote that the “streets [of Zanzibar] are empty of prostitutes because the homes are full of them and there is no scandal because there is no shame” — Bateman assumes neither a tone of imperial dehumanization nor falls prey to what Jeremy Prestholdt describes as a strain of “British humanitarian discourse” whereby the Zanzibari become “blank slates onto which the interests of others could be written”. Bateman opens his preface not in the register of idylls or myth, but with a description of Unguja circa 1871, before the late-nineteenth century New Imperialism, when the “Scramble for Africa” accelerated. The island, writes Bateman, “was the starting place of all expeditions into the interior”, with caravans loaded with beads and cloth to be traded inland for “elephants’ tusks and slaves — for Unguja boasted the only, and the last, open slave-market in the world then”. Much has changed, yet Bateman sounds like he could be commenting on twenty-first century trophy-hunting tourism when discussing parties of “rich white men going to hunt ‘big game’”. Bateman’s interest in conservation is both biological and linguistic. Yet, like the folktales selected here, he is perhaps more concerned with the animals than the people of Zanzibar. “If you have read any accounts of adventure in Africa, you will know that travelers never mention animals of any kind that are gifted with the faculty of speech. . . No, indeed; only the native-born know of these. . . it will not be long before such wonderful specimens of zoology will be as extinct as the ichthyosaurus, dinornis, and other poor creatures who never dreamed of the awful names that would be applied to them”.

public-domain-review

Oct 22, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:27.798240

heart-serpent

A Monster in the Heart: Edward May’s A Most Certaine and True Relation (1639) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 5, 2021 When John Pennant passed on October 6, 1637, at the age of twenty-one, the young man’s family began investigating. His aunt and uncle, Sir Francis and Lady Herris, called for a surgeon to perform an autopsy, accompanied by physician Edward May, who relates the following tale. Pennant’s organs were in a mixed state: his bladder “full of purulent and ulcerous matter”; one kidney was “consumed”, the other “as big as any two kidnies”; the lungs were reasonably good; and, while part of his liver had an irregular growth, that could be chalked up to “his writing profession”. It was the heart that seemed most impacted — Pennant’s left ventricle was “as hard as a stone” and had gathered “all the blood that was in his body left”. But May and the surgeon discovered more than blood. Cutting further into the organ, they perceived “a carnouse [fleshy] substance. . . wreathed together in foldes like a worme or Serpent”, which the doctors subdued with a circle of garlic, just in case it remained alive. How did a serpent get into Pennant’s heart? May is not sure, but begins assembling evidence. It may have lived there for three years, when the youth stopped buttoning his “Doublet in the Morning, but [chose to] be open breasted in all weathers”. The doctor then turns to medical literature, referencing a case in John Stow’s 1586 chronicle, which seems to describe equine heartworm. While we now know that humans are rarer hosts for Dirofilaria than horses or dogs, Stowe made a deduction that the parasite might be present in our hearts as well. May has no problem acknowledging that wormy creatures can thrive within the body — for he casually recounts how people have been known to “vomit Yeeles [eels] and Serpents of strange forms” — but believes they usually live in the stomach and rarely pass to the heart. This “most certaine and true relation”, like other early-modern medical treatises, relates empirical observation to classical knowledge, moving, in a matter of pages, from a history of the individual’s illness to “How Hippocrates and the Ancients are to be understood”. More curious, it seems the parasite transmitted some of its higher qualities to the host. Before his death, John Pennant “had an excellent Eye”, “extraordinarily sharpe”, “like the Eye of a Serpent”, which leads May to an affirmation of what is known as the doctrine of signatures, a belief that proximity engenders resemblance: “secret, unusuall and strange inward diseases, doe send forth some radios, or signatures from the center”. He hopes that these signatures might be recognized by other physicians before serpents kill their patients too. As for this particular monster, it was sewn back into Pennant’s corpse, honoring Dorothy Pennant’s wishes for her son: “As it came with him, so it shall goe with him”. Centuries later, the creature still puzzles medical researchers. Thankfully, it seems that it was not a worm, serpent, or extraterrestrial alien eel. Writing in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (1977), D.A. Denham recounts wondering if the “monster” was in fact the first reference to Dirofilaria immitis in humans, but says he was “quickly disabused” of the notion. Certain that it is not a parasitic worm, Denham thinks the most likely explanation for the “monster” is merely a misidentified blood plasma clot, formed after death, and in no way related to Pennant’s illness. Writing in a 2001 issue of The Lancet, Ruth Richardson agrees with Denham, and exonerates Dorothy Pennant, whom May had called “babish” for destroying medical evidence, finding an enduring “disjunction between public and professional notions of what appropriately belongs to the dead”. Perhaps this is a mystery best left undisturbed.

public-domain-review

Oct 5, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:28.134062

bottleman

A Modest Apology for the Man in the Bottle (1749) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 27, 2021 A message in a bottle? Sure. A five-masted model ship, running downwind, enclosed within a flask? Difficult, but it can be done. What about a lithe harlequin, squeezing himself into a jug? That must be an impossible feat . . . right? Scheduled to appear at London’s Haymarket Theatre in January 1749, the Bottle Conjuror promised exactly this: not so much an act of conjuring, but a feat of human condensation. The Bottle Conjurer was less of an illusionist’s event, the event more an illusion in itself. John Timbs sets the scene in Romance of London (1865), his remarkable three-volume collection of “strange stories” about poisoners, corpse burglars, the cudgeling of John Dryden, and, of course, The Bottle Conjuror. According to Timbs, this ruse arose from bored nobility, the Duke of Montagu and Earl of Chesterfield, debating the gullibility of fools. “‘Surely’, said Lord Chesterfield, ‘if a man should say that he would jump into a quart bottle, nobody would believe that!’” The Duke disagreed and so they put out a public notice, advertising that the performance was to be held where a person would “get into a tavern quart bottle, without equivocation, and while there sing several songs, and suffer any spectator to handle the bottle”. As if this was not intriguing enough, they claimed that the conjuror could play the sound of every instrument in the world through a simple walking cane, and raise the dead, for the purposes of polite conversation. Tickets were bought, hats and coats were checked at the door, and the Haymarket brimmed with an anticipatory audience. They sat for roughly an hour, according to Barbara M. Benedict, staring at an empty vessel on an unadorned table. Momentarily diffusing the collective tension, an audience member shouted that he would squeeze himself into a beer mug if paid double the price of admission. Guffaws resounded, but this jubilation quickly spiraled into rage when the house proprietor finally revealed that the evening’s promised entertainment had vanished into thin air (along with the audience’s possessions from the cloakroom, claims Benedict). One thing is certain: the crowd rioted, tearing up benches, destroying the sets and scenery, and dragging whatever possible out onto London’s streets, staging a bonfire, with the theater’s curtain hoisted as a kind of victory flag. The event was not without humor: tricked by his own social class, the Duke of Cumberland (son to the King) was particularly enraged and drew his saber, intending to charge the bottle, only to be quickly disarmed. Quoting a letter sent by “a Scotch Jacobite lady”, Timbs ribs the Duke: “Fools should not have chopping-sticks”. Conspiracy theories proliferated. Some claimed that the Bottle Man had been ready to perform, but, as a warmup, decided to demonstrate the illusion in the theater’s green room to a potential patron. He soon found himself corked and kidnapped. William S. Walsh relates the story in his Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892): Thus the poor man being bit himself, in being confined in the Bottle and in a Gentleman’s Pocket, could not be in another Place; for he never advertised he would go into two Bottles at one and the same time. He is still in the Gentleman’s custody, who uncorks him now and then to feed him; but his long confinement has so damped his Spirits that instead of singing and dancing he is perpetually crying and cursing his ill Fate. Alongside the numerous parodies and satires that arose in the wake of this hoax, many of the “facts” remain historical conjecture. The Duke of Montagu and Earl of Chesterfield were not credited as authors of the prank until twenty-three years after the event. And other sources swap Montagu for the Duke of Portland. Stranger still, an associate of Montagu, Dudley Bradstreet — a famed government informant during the Jacobite uprising — claimed to have retired from tradecraft into bottle conjury, taking credit for the hoax and going so far as to pen a play about his exploits. (An extensive history in an 1831 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine outlines Bradstreet’s claim.) The bottle hoax reflected other satires. Notably, a series of etchings featuring “Don Jumpedo”, who one-ups the Bottle Conjuror by jumping down his own throat. Featured above for your perusal is a mysterious pamphlet that appeared in the same year as the Haymarket Theatre debacle: A Modest Apology for the Man in the Bottle. Its author, who signs the pamphlet as “The Bottleman”, blames the event on his loss of work to an immigrant labor force, claiming that he staged the “Stratagem” for profit, as a desperate attempt “to keep the Wolf from the Door”. He longs for a patron of the arts, but has little artistic talent. Were he an “Italian Singer”, fiddler, or dancer, there would have been no need for the bottle. And, after much self pity, The Bottleman rebuts critics who have compared him to the “Son of Satan or Satan himself”, describing the failings of government, taxation, and foreign relations as much worse evils. The most plausible explanation offered is that it was, simply, the wrong bottle: “my Intent was to please the Audience in a very, very large Bottle”. The writer explains that he had practiced the act for years, only to find himself sabotaged by a vase. The apology, in other words, is anything but . . . and occasionally decays into raving speculations that take the form of Schrödinger-like thought experiments: “the only Question will arise is, Whether I was, or was not in the Bottle?”, to which the anonymous author asks us to consider a third option: “Whether I am not in the Bottle still. . .?” In a sense, the Haymarket hoax had a metaphysical quality akin to paradoxes like “the Kilkenny cats”, who consume each other whole, leaving only their tails behind. Promising vanishment, the very event vanished before its eager audiences’ eyes, leaving a history of dubious tales and half-truths in its void.

public-domain-review

Sep 27, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:28.563816

frogs-to-apollo

Between Frogs and Gods: Illustrations of Physiognomy Text by Paloma Ruiz and Hunter Dukes Jan 6, 2022 For many of us, the image of a frog evokes feelings which fall anywhere between utter ambivalence and mild fondness. The common frog is neither fearsomely feral, nor an affectionate family pet. Children chase them, princesses kiss them, and backyard swimmers rescue them from drowning in pools. For Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), however, frogs are “the swollen representative of a disgusting bestiality”, and a manifestation of true “satanical hideousness and malignity”. In light of these epithets, one might wonder, what did the frog do to deserve such scathing description? In Lavater’s understanding, the frog’s fault resides in the angle of its forehead. The etchings above, commissioned by Lavater from the Swiss printmaker Christian von Mechel (1737–1817), put the physiognomist’s ideas into color and motion. Across twenty-four frames, the profile of an unassuming amphibian slowly metamorphs into that of Apollo (considered the epitome of masculine beauty). At its core, Lavater’s physiognomy relies on the belief that a creature’s true character and morality can be discerned from their “lines of countenance”, often revealed by analyzing silhouettes. In many ways, he spent his career trying to offer scientific proof of the ancient Greek concept known as kalokagathia — that goodness manifests as beauty, evil as ugliness — the focus of his greatest-known work, the four-volume Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–1778). The frog-to-Apollo images, and the text they illustrate (“Ueber die Animalitäts-Linien”), didn't feature in the original German edition of Lavater’s treatise, but plans were made to include it as a supplement to the much delayed French edition of the final volume. It seems Lavater had an idea for the amphibian sequence as early as 1777, the date given to a copperplate engraving (likely by Lavater himself) found in his collection, but it wasn't until the 1790s that things were readied for publication. Lavater commissioned etchings from Mechel in 1795 (seemingly based on this earlier copperplate engraving), but he was ultimately dissatisfied with Mechel's efforts (and price) and rejected them. Lavater would die before the frog-to-Apollo text with accompanying images finally made it into print, first in an 1802 collection of unpublished writings, and then in the long awaited French fourth volume published the following year. In both of these versions we see simple line renditions — much closer to the 1777 engraving than Mechel's interpretation. The frog-to-Apollo motif also crops up in additional unattributed images, such as the series of twenty-four small-format watercolors by an anonymous draftsman held at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (dated to 1795, reproduced at the end of this post), and others that David Bindman found, during research for Ape to Apollo, in the Lavater's “Kunstkabinett” — a personal archive of more than 22,000 portraits. While these images of the human emerging from the animal might, at first glance, seem to anticipate Darwinian theories of evolution, Lavater was, as Bindman comments, “a Protestant preacher fervently hostile to Enlightenment thinking and to anything that would suggest a continuum between the animal and the human”. (Darwin, on the other hand, owned a well-read version of Lavater's writings.) For Lavater, the series of images leading from frog through “primitive man” to Grecian god, demonstrated rigid and unchanging taxonomic divisions between humans and animals, and also between some humans and other (in his view) lesser humans. Like the ancients before him, Lavater believed that, after careful examination, the disposition of every human and animal would reveal itself through the proportions of the head. In his writings, the angle of the neck corresponds to sincerity; the chin to sensuality; and the lips to a mixture of anger, love, or hate. Small nostrils are notorious for denoting timidity, and the bridge of the nose speaks to tranquility versus brute strength. However, the most important appears to have been the angle of the forehead. Invoking the work of Pieter Camper, a Dutch anatomist dedicated to studying facial angles across species, Lavater explains how the twenty-five degree angle of the frog's head increases to a roughly seventy degree angle in the head of a man. Compounded with the belief that, “of all earthly creatures, man is the most perfect”, Lavater linked this vertical visage to intelligence and wit, as well as “the transition from brutal deformity to ideal beauty”. In a fascinating twist — or perhaps a Protestant cringe at classical polytheism — Lavater also notes that many Greek gods and heroes are depicted as having dramatically protruding foreheads, with angles of up to one-hundred degrees. This extreme physiognomy may be demonstrative of their divinity, but it is “not naturally beautiful, not truly human”. While Lavater may have believed that “man is the most perfect”, he did not believe that all races were equal within that perfection. He writes that while the European forehead is “most beautiful”, averaging around eighty degrees, the average Chinese forehead is seventy-five, and an angle “below seventy degrees gives the countenance of the negro of Angola and the Calmuc; and by a further diminution soon loses all trace of resemblance to humanity”. In tying certain spiritual, intellectual, or moral capacity to the shapes of heads and faces — with the ideal echoing his own visage — Lavater's ideas are inseparable from the history of scientific racism and the emerging frameworks of racial categorization in the late eighteenth-century. Backed by an anthropocentric belief that non-human species are foul and unintelligent, physiognomists such as Lavater weaponized the face to create a racial hierarchy, ranking non-Europeans much nearer to the realm of “satanical” animality. As the title of Richard T. Gray's 2004 study implies, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz, physiognomy set in motion a mode of profiling and differentiating human bodies that enabled some of the most horrific events in modern history.

public-domain-review

Jan 6, 2022

Paloma Ruiz and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:29.133227

baraduc-soul

Imaging Inscape: The Human Soul (1913) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 17, 2021 In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod. And yet, he argues, it is possible to image the fluidic invisible with instruments more precise than the human eye — capturing the radiation of thoughts, feelings, and other emissions of soulscape. As Anthony Enns discusses in an essay on visualizing thoughts, Baraduc experimented with magnetometers and electrographs before deciding that photography was the best technology for “recording invisible forces emanating from the nervous system”. Unlike most photographers, the paranormal researcher did not always use a lens, preferring, instead, to have his subjects directly transmit their soul’s vibrations onto a chemical plate, which was sometimes placed against a person’s forehead to reduce latency. So as to distinguish this technology from photography, which uses solar light, Baraduc called his process iconography: In iconography, the plate receives, very slowly, no longer by the solar ray, but by an electro-vital current (wind, breeze) or simply by a direct emission, no longer, the exterior light of the object, but what is called its internal light, its intimate soul, which it records. To harness this aqueous force requires replacing “the exterior luminous ray of the here-below” with “the electric breeze, projecting the emanated vibration of our soul”. Only then will the fluidic invisible allow itself to be magnetised — “one must, in a word, know how to induct the psycho-odo-fluidic current”. And indeed, Baraduc knew how to induct something: interspersed in the original French text of 1896, and collected at the end of the English translation above, we find reproductions of these iconographic plates. Something strange happens as Baraduc’s book progresses (as if all this was not yet strange enough). The prose he uses to describe his iconographs glows with an energy stylistically akin to the very vitality that he claimed to capture: “Red obscurity. State of soul magnetising; desire-demand, prayer to the psychic universal spirit of the world. The prayer has elliptically inflected a very beautiful net of fine psychic lamellas; subtle cosmic pneuma, universal web of light, of remarkable purity.” Unfortunately — and rather beautifully — Baraduc’s printed plates are less remarkably pure, but almost remarkable for their impurity. The lead image shows an underexposed figure surrounded by a web-like aura, which has sprouted something resembling a wing. It is captioned: “the Od attracted by the state of soul of a child lamenting over a recently killed pheasant”. Other plates look like shimmering refractions of light on mica or quartz, which are explained as the Od “individualising itself to repair the deficient sensitive soul” and “Life-animules”. In one image, Baraduc used a Nadar photograph, which he subsequently overlaid with “psychicon” — Baraduc’s thoughts made visible. Some plates evoke a night sky, showered with comets (“Large sized pearls of voluntary psychob”) and another contains a handprint in the negative, with caterpillar-like bristles frizzing outward from all fingers (what he elsewhere calls “soul germ”). For the scholar Jed Rasula, Baraduc’s occultism was merely an intensification of that encrypted presence of other life that we feel when viewing any media form. “Every transaction with a text, a musical score, a painting, or a sculpture, is a personal seance.” Baraduc was attempting to perform this “seance” in real time, accessing those aspects of other people — their internal spiritual lives — that we can only normally experience through translation. If, in his attempt to access the “inner” world, Baraduc sounds rather “out there”, you would not be the first to try and discredit his claims. As Peter Geimer chronicles, the polymath Adrien Guébhard led a “ten-year crusade against Baraduc’s ‘false flames’”. Yet Baraduc was a respected physician, working on the edges of nineteenth-century medical and psychological research. Georges Didi-Huberman recounts, in Invention of Hysteria, that, despite his “delirium”, Baraduc “was, nonetheless, a very serious ‘specialist’”, researching in league with Jean-Martin Charcot and other neurologists associated with the Salpêtrière hospital and its violent legacy. No matter how disproven, Baraduc’s work, writes Didi-Huberman, “was far from marginal to the knowledge or practice of photography, or to the neuropathology of the time. Scientific teratology is effective in science’s own domain.” While The Human Soul begins in the register of a scientist researching fringe and esoteric phenomena, it ends as a religious treatise. Nested in double negatives, we find a material vision of the Godhead. “Atheists, blasphemers, sceptics, madmen, believers and saints, we are not able not to be God, who only is.” Immersed in a fluidic invisible, of which we are both the container and contained, we float in the amniotic liquid of divinity.

public-domain-review

Nov 17, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:29.646712

zander-gym

Gustave Zander and the 19th-Century Gym Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 4, 2022 As some of us squat, shove, and crunch our way toward new resolutions — while others arrive at the relieving conclusion that their Christmas kettlebell purchase makes for the perfect doorstop — we might wonder, with gratitude or suspicion, why and when gym going became such a widespread phenomenon. Long before Muscle Beach, tubs of whey protein powder, or the distinct grade of shame that emanates from an unused fitness club card, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their pecs in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute. Of course, ritualized group fitness is nothing new: Ancient Greece had gymnasia; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) trained through the game now called lacrosse (one of many intersections between fitness and colonialism); and physical regimens have been encouraged or required by nearly every empire and religion in recorded history. Zander’s contribution and revolution came in the form of resistance training and muscle-group-isolating exercises using specialized machinery, precursors to those contemporary contraptions built from welded metal frames, rubber resistance bands, and stacking steel plates. In his 1894 treatise on “medico-mechanical gymnastics”, Zander discusses his system as if administering a regimen of medication. “The prescription [of exercise] is methodically composed according to the needs and condition of the patient.” And the regimen worked. As Sven Lindqvist records, Zander’s success swelled at an anabolic rate. Having opened his first institute in 1865 with twenty-seven machines, by 1877 “there were fifty-three different Zander machines in five Swedish towns”. And not long after, Zander reinvented himself professionally. Once a lecturer in gymnastics at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, he soon became an international fitness entrepreneur, exporting equipment to Russia, England, Germany, and Argentina. The history of the modern work out is inseparable from the history of work. In the late-nineteenth century, concerns related to occupational health and on-the-job injuries came to the fore during discussions among ergonomically-oriented physicians. Zander marketed his machines as safeguards against “a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office”, promising “increased well-being and capacity for work”. In a sense, his machines offset injuries caused by other machines: advances in mechanization created new forms of labor divorced from physical exertion. One had to work out to remain physically capable of performing further work in the office. As Carolyn Thomas (formerly de la Peña) traces, in her history of “Cybex Space”, adapted from a larger project on machines and bodies, Zander’s project began under the auspices of Sweden’s welfare state. His research was government funded and the gyms accessible to all. After winning a design award at the 1876 Centennial and International Exposition in Philadelphia, he pivoted from a focus on general public “health” to furnishing “elite health spas” and private institutes with his “fitness” machines. “In mechanized workouts”, writes Thomas, “white-collar Americans pumped up their own superiority. By declaring that ‘fitness’ equaled a perfectly balanced physique, rather than the ability to perform actual physical tasks, body power was shifted from laborers to loungers.” The images collected below come from a catalogue distributed by “Görransson’s mekaniska verkstad”, a gymnastics equipment company, and are reproduced in a book published by Dr. Alfred Levertin on Dr. G. Zander’s Medico-Mechanische Gymastik (1892). Aside from the shock of seeing the gymgoers’ choice of athletic wear (thick three-piece suits with pocket watches affixed on chains), there is something uncanny about the marked lack of exertion displayed on Zander’s patients’ faces. As Thomas explains, unlike contemporary Peloton and Crossfit leaderboards, which prioritize competition and reward individual effort, Zander’s technology was marketed as a passive activity — with some devices even driven by steam, gasoline, or electricity. All one had to do was connect their body to the machine and it would do the work for them. . . or so they were told. ※※Indexed under…ExerciseSteam-powered

public-domain-review

Jan 4, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:30.108704

odd-showers

Odd Showers (1870) Text by Hunter Dukes Dec 2, 2021 George Duncan Gibb (1821–1876) begins his Odd Showers on horseback, outside the city of Montreal, loping along a road littered with frogs. Given the newly damp ground and absence of local waterways, he comes to the only logical conclusion: these amphibians fell from the sky. After pocketing a few specimens in his handkerchief, the author rides back to the city, and forgets about his slimy stowaways. The scene turns predictably comical. While Gibb takes tea with fine company in his relative’s drawing room, “which included several ladies”, his specimens free themselves and make for the crumpets. “Intended chiefly for young persons”, this short, odd book confronts a question that has vexed naturalists for thousands of years: how do we account for the precipitation of animals? In his Natural History, Pliny thought it unlikely that toads and raindrops shared common origins. As Izaak Walton remarks in The Compleat Angler (1653), it would make more sense if frogs turned to slime in the winter and then, during summer rains, regained their animal form, like magic sponge capsules tossed in the bath. While the source of “raining cats and dogs” is contentious — some say it stems from pets slipping off of thatched roofs in the 1600s — Gibb thinks he has discovered the solution regarding fishes and lizards: they are “sucked up by waterspout or otherwise raised by a hurricane and transported to a distance more or less remote”. Invoking a suspiciously named authority on such matters, Dr. Arthur Fisher, the author moves on to odder phenomena still: red snow, as recorded by Armenians in 1056; red rain, which stained the streets of Orsio, Sweden, ca. 1711; and hailstones made of millet seed, which sowed their way across Silesia centuries ago. For a book about showers, the tone is rather dry and disenchanting throughout, and it remains unclear why Gibb aimed his book at children. As if realizing that he needed to lighten the tone, he concludes with an original poem, a deluge of fourteen quatrains, which certainly achieve merriment, but mainly at the poet’s expense: To such concerning frogs we don’t give ear,      Though well described by Pliny;Their reality though never proved, some aver,      Whom the learned look upon as silly.But when we talk of showers of fishes      Perceptibly doth our visage lengthen;With good testimony it soon diminishes,      From undoubted examples we make mention.Ha! Not so with newts and lizards,      For we but a single instance give,Yet if honest story be considered      This odd shower we cannot disprove. Gibb’s biography contains its own odd shower of anecdotes. He completed his medical degree at McGill with a thesis titled “Morbid states of the urine”, perhaps evidencing a lifelong fascination with abnormal torrents. He later moved to London and achieved notable prestige in medicine as a laryngologist, and dedicated his treatise on the whooping cough to Lord Elgin. With a side interest in geology and archaeology, he was famed for his industry: working as a reporter for the Lancet for a decade, Gibb wrote an estimated 3120 columns. Sadly, as David A. Crawford notes, Gibb died in disrepute, having obsessively pursued his claim as the rightful inheritor of “a defunct baronetcy of Falkland and Carribber” (hence his occasional use of the wishful pseudonym “Carribber”). Yet regarding “odd showers”, it seems Gibb got it right: the lluvia de peces occurs annually in Yoro, Honduras and, in Norfolk, our new millennium was ushered in by a school of airborne sprats, flying high on Gibb’s mechanism.

public-domain-review

Dec 2, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:30.658873

humane-society

Resurrection on Repeat: Rules and Orders of the Humane Society (1787) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 19, 2022 To bring the deceased back to life, especially those taken before their time, has long been a dream of legends and myth. In the case of the “apparently drowned”, however, it is possible to perform the seemingly miraculous and restore a limp body to full animation before lethal asphyxiation occurs. Yet despite the relatively simple techniques needed to perform this operation, they have taken millenia to develop. Early representations of resuscitation are shallow in information. Some scholars point to the Battle of Kadesh, as depicted at the Egyptian Ramesseum, where the drowned Hittite Emperor is held upside down by his men; others to the Hebrew Book of Kings, where Elisha revives a dead child with his “mouth upon his mouth” as an example of artificial ventilation. The idiom “over a barrel” may point to a practice, possibly medieval in origins, for rolling an unconscious body on a cask until they cough up water (or it might equally suggest flogging). The history of modern resuscitation in Europe conjures, though did not coin, another idiom: “to blow smoke up your”. . . well, we all know where that leads. Driven by an Enlightenment humanitarianism, social reformers and physicians began addressing a leading cause of preventable expiration that had rarely been treated on a national scale — death by water. In the 1730s, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur popularized a recent discovery: the seemingly lifeless could be revived with a wealth of strategies. This “Pliny of the Eighteenth Century” (Réaumur invented a precursor to the Celsius scale, influenced methods of silk production in China, and pioneered the process of metallic tinning still used today) wrote a pamphlet titled Avis pour donner du secours à ceux que l’on croit noyez (Advice to aid those believed drowned). After debating the pros and cons of tickling the nose with feathers and filling a drowning man’s mouth with warm urine, Réaumur reveals what he believes to be the best technique: using a pipe stem to blow stimulating tobacco smoke into the intestines through the rectum. Louis XV found the pamphlet dazzling and encouraged its wide distribution. Startlingly, as Anton Serdeczny discusses in his recent book on reanimation, soon riverbanks across Europe were lined with “resuscitation kits”, as close-by as a contemporary defibrillator, which contained all the necessary supplies for giving a nicotine enema (and later, thankfully, included bellows as a substitute for breath). ※※Indexed under…Urinein mouth to revive the drowned The pamphlet above documents thirteen years of success since the 1774 establishment of Britain’s Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead by Drowning (still in existence, with an expanded mission, today). Why was a society necessary for what many might do on impulse? Despite a wealth of new resuscitation methods, it was difficult to encourage public uptake (even the anatomist William Hunter, for instance, considered mouth-to-mouth breathing “vulgar”). Due to the taboo of touching corpses and a scientific/folk belief that once respiration ceased, so too fled the soul, the semi-drowned often suffocated while surrounded by their rescuers, who presumed them already gone. Also, many would-be lifeguards did not know how to swim. The Humane Society in London was created after Dutch physicians, inspired by Réaumur, established a society in Amsterdam, where canal drownings were plentiful, offering educational information and paying “premiums to those who saved the life of a citizen in danger of perishing by water”. The success of this society, evidenced by its proceedings, encouraged similar social programs across Europe. In Britain, an English translation was commissioned by William Hawes and Thomas Cogan, who founded the Humane Society soon after, announcing “The Plan” in a 1774 pamphlet. By 1787, the Society was able to show results — 897 lives saved — and, in the rhetoric of welfare statehood, deemed itself a “great public utility”. The pamphlet contains the latest “plain Methods of Treatment” to recover the drowned. First remove the clothes and replace them with the great-coats of bystanders. Then move the body to the nearest pub, preferably with a good fire in winter months. One person should blow bellows into a nostril, closing the other, so that “the noxious and stagnant vapours will be expelled, and natural breathing imitated”, while a second person rhythmically compresses the chest. What, for a moment, resembles contemporary CPR, then takes a culinary turn. Next, rub the body with salt and spritz it with rum: hot brandy should be applied to the stomach and loins when needed and “the nostrils now and then tickled with a feather”. Here comes the tobacco: “fumes should be thrown up the fundament”, continuously, while making sure to shake the body every so often. Should all else fail, the society recommends electrocuting the corpse — a technique only to be tried by “the judicious and skilful”. Never bleed the body. The rest of the pamphlet is packed with eye-witness testimonies of resuscitation. While the techniques are not quite those we use today, they seemed to get results, and were frequently reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine and other periodicals. Yet the Humane Society’s greatest tool may have been financial incentive: two guineas for attempted rescues in the Westminster area; four guineas per successful resuscitation; and a guinea to the pub for providing premises. Not only were the seemingly-drowned experiencing novel treatments, more bodies were being pulled out of the waters than ever before. While it is easy to laugh at the idea of a tobacco smoke enema, resuscitation practices continue to be refined — what saves lives today, may soon be antiquated. In 1906, Sydney Holland, President of the Life-Saving Society, fatally ruptured the spleen of a young woman by using the “Silvester Method”, which required four people to lift the arms and apply chest pressure, prompting him to encourage the “Schäfer Method”, where the body is placed face-down and the thorax compressed, which he subsequently propagated throughout the British Empire. The same networks that allowed Holland to disseminate reforms had been used to extract knowledge and medicines for centuries. During the colonial period when non-Western healthcare was systematically dismissed and suppressed as irrational and superstitious, indigenous techniques were refashioned as European. In 1891, physicians were inspired after a man in Australia was restored by a smoky fire, “a native method”. And the tobacco enema, requiring a New World crop, tracks back to the practices of indigenous peoples across North and South America, described by John Tennant, who controversially adapted these herbal remedies in The Poor Planter’s Physician (ca. 1727), more than a decade before Réaumur published his treatise.

public-domain-review

Jan 19, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:31.112075

book-of-fate

Hieroglyphics of a Rope-Dancer: The Book of Fate (1822) Text by Kevin Dann Jan 25, 2022 On July 4, 1822, in the midst of London’s most pronounced season of both Egypto- and Napoleonomania, there appeared in bookshops on the Strand, Piccadilly, and Fleet Street a most curious artifact: The Book of Fate: Formerly in the Possession of Napoleon, Late Emperor of France, and Now First Rendered into English from a German Translation of An Ancient Egyptian Manuscript, Found in the Year 1801, by M. Sonnini, in One of the Royal Tombs, Near Mount Libycus, in Upper Egypt. Authored by Herman Kirchenhoffer — Fellow of the University of Pavia, Knight Grand Cross of the Annunciade of Sardinia, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour — the book featured a large foldout table of “Hieroglyphical Indications of the Planets”, a grid of symbols that were the intermediate key to deciphering answers to thirty-two rather homely “oracular” questions, such as: Shall I live to an Old Age? Shall I ever be able to retire from business with a Fortune? Will my Beloved prove true in my absence? Are Absent Friends in good health & what is their present employment? A minor sensation deemed a work of “great ingenuity” in the Gazette of Fashion, by November it had spawned a much less ingenious knock-off, London astrologer Robert Cross Smith’s The Philosophical Merlin, whose subtitle echoed and extended the Book of Fate’s extravagant claim of imperial provenance: The Translation of a Valuable Manuscript, Formerly in the Possession of Napoleon Buonaparte, Found Amongst Other Valuable Papers, in His Cabinet, At the Battle of Leipsic; Known to Have Been Highly Prized by Him, and Consulted for the Choice of His Generals. The Book of Fate sold briskly, seeing a dozen editions before 1840, and another dozen abridged editions — including translations into Spanish and Italian — under various titles before 1923, when pornographic book purveyor H. S. Nichols brought out a facsimile edition of the 1822 work. As sailor Jack Blunt’s much-consulted Bonaparte Dream Book, it had a cameo role in Herman Melville’s Redburn (1849). Although one reviewer had called it an “innocent hoax” as early as 1823, it remains in print, now masquerading under such monikers as Napoleon's Book of Fate: Ancient Egyptian Fortune-telling for Today (1988); Napoleon's Lucky Dream Book: A Book of Fate (2005); and Napoleon's Book of Fate and Oraculum (2010). While the image of an astrologer Bonaparte, plotting his battles by means of “hieroglyphic indications”, is intriguing, the book was indeed an “innocent hoax”. There never was a “Herman Kirchenhoffer”, nor were any of his august affiliations genuine. The book’s account of discoveries in the tomb at Thebes was cribbed from Louis-Madeleine Ripault’s Report of the Commission of Arts (1800), its historical dissertation on Greek oracles plagiarized from Abraham Rees’ 1810 Cyclopedia and a pair of contemporary sources. The divinatory chart’s “hieroglyphical indications” were all crude freehand renderings of well-known Freemasonic symbols, its oracular interrogatories paraphrasings of the questions posed by a century-long tradition of French jeux divinatoires — cartomantic devices played mostly by young women. “The Writing of Balapsis, by Command of Hermes Trismegistus, Unto the Priests of the Great Temple”, which seguéd seamlessly into elaborate instructions on “How the Enquirer Shall Obtain a True Answer to the Question Which He Putteth to the Oracle”, was pure invention, laced with hijinks such as advising the reader that he might substitute “a pen dipped in common ink” for the reed dipped in blood by the ancient Egyptian priests, and forego confining consultation of the Oracle to eclipses of the Sun and Moon. The book’s explanation for its language — that the idiom of its 1024 “moral axioms” sounded more English than Egyptian because of some universal philosophical convergence — was purely tongue-in-cheek, as were not a few of those oracular answers: Avoid entering into the land of strangers.Preserve the greatest equanimity at the gaming table.Avoid edge–tools!Yes! From its cleverly constructed provenance, which passed the papyrus through no fewer than nine separate hands, to its heartfelt dedication to the Empress Marie-Louise (one of the invented owners), nearly every single page of The Book of Fate bore the sly signature of a master prevaricator. Its hallmark was prodigality: the author clearly unable to help himself from fabricating fancies as glibly as its thousand-plus proverbs. Of the three other books published by this author in 1822, The Napoleon Anecdotes: Illustrating the Mental Energies of the Late Emperor of France, and the Character and Actions of His Contemporary Statesmen and Warriors ran to five volumes, The Maid of Orleans Or la Pucelle of Voltaire Translated Into English Verse with Notes with Notes, Explanatory, Critical, Historical and Biographical occupied two, while the third, France for the Last Seven Years, or, the Bourbons was a mere 424 pages long. Though each bore the author’s name, William Henry Ireland, he had in previous years penned books as “Charles Clifford”, “I-Spy-I”, “Flagellum”, “Aere Perennius”, “H.C.”, “Cervantes”, “Satiricus Sculptor, Esq.”, “Anser Pen-Dragon, Esq.”, “Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland”, “Thomas Fielding”, “Henry Boyle”, and — for Something Concerning Nobody (1814) — “Somebody”. In 1828, as “Baron Karlo Excellmanns”, he wrote yet another paean to his beloved “First Consul”, The Eventful Life of Napoleon Bonaparte: Late Emperor of the French. Despite having written, under his own name, four successful Gothic novels and a four-volume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1828) illustrated by George Cruikshank, when he died in 1835, the author was still widely and derisively known as “Shakespeare Ireland” — a nickname he had earned after confessing to forging a cornucopia of spurious Shakespeare creations, including Vortigern and Rowena, which was produced at Drury Lane Theatre in 1796. Present-day scholars routinely dub Ireland a “forger” who in the wake of his youthful Shakespeare prank, committed at the age of nineteen, was condemned to a life as a “Grub Street hack”. I prefer to think of him as the real life literary version of Bartolomeo Oranzi, a character from his own 1808 novel Rizzio: Or, Scenes in Europe During the Sixteenth Century, whose funambuliste caperings — leaping thirty feet above the street to pass through a hoop and seize a stout brass ring — Ireland pronounced “the most extraordinary feat I have ever seen performed”. “Thou art cut out for a rope-dancer”, reads one of the thirty-two hieroglyphical indications under the sign of the pyramid. Surely William Henry Ireland, aka Herman Kirchenhoffer, was in that one oracular pronouncement signing his own name. Below, you can examine a 1797 satirical etching, of the Ireland family as forgers, courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library (the nineteen-year-old William Henry sits before the fire reading a children’s chapbook).

public-domain-review

Jan 25, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:31.611797

mellan-sudarium-of-saint-veronica

An Iconic Line: Claude Mellan’s The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 2, 2021 Christ gazes out of the page dolefully, head canted and haloed. He seems to float, disembodied, between our world and the next. And, at first, we could step back in sympathy, shocked by the blood that drips like teardrops from those baleful thorns. But something else soon catches light. It might be the ringed texture of his eyeshine or that fingerprint whorl on the nose's tip. Then we notice the print's corners, where curves recede as waves do from a skipping stone. It can't be, we think — but it is. This image was made with a single line. Born into a family of coppersmiths in northern France, Claude Mellan (1598--1688) trained in Rome with the painter Simon Vouet, before creating his pièce de résistance in 1649. To make this immaculate engraving, Mellan used a technique known as the "swelling line", which takes advantage of the burin's asymmetrical profile. Just as letters formed by a fountain pen will swell or shrink as the angle shifts between nib and page, by rotating his tool — or widening a preexisting groove — Mellan created visual depth and texture in an unbroken line, incised directly onto a metal plate. While engraving emerged in Germany ca. 1430 as an offshoot of goldsmithing and metalwork, spurred by a newfound access to paper in Europe, swelling lines were not common before the 1560s. As curators at RISD write, the technique was particularly suited for "reproducing the dramatic light and tonal effects of paintings as well as the exaggerated, heroic forms of late Renaissance and Mannerist art". In Mellan's case, he used the technique to reproduce a different kind of dramatic light: the holy afterglow of relics. The title of this engraving references the sudarium (a handkerchief, or, literally, sweat cloth) of Saint Veronica, exemplary of the relic class known by the Greek term acheiropoieta — made without hand. Think, for instance, of the Turin shroud or the Manoppello image. Veronica's veil was supposedly emblazoned with Christ's image via impression, after she blotted the inky blood from his face on Calvary, a process that itself resembles a kind of printmaking. There is indeed an indexical quality to Mellan's engraving, making it feel intimately connected to Christ, an effect that only intensifies when viewed closely. Even for secular viewers, this image might prompt reflections on the magical quality of mimesis. Writing on the astonishment he felt while looking at photographs, Roland Barthes reached for Veronica's veil: "Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica's napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?" While this engraving was made by a human hand, long before photography, the astonishing complexity and otherworldly beauty of Mellan's image make it feel like a miracle. Built on the "mystic spiral", this image becomes an arcane invitation for contemplation, whether aesthetic or spiritual. As the art historian Irving Lavin writes in an extensive study of his own obsession: . . . anyone who begins to trace the convolutions of the single, continuous, undulating spiral line that evolves (or devolves, depending on the direction one follows) ultimately to fill the universal void of the paper sheet, cannot escape becoming, as I have been, entranced, enchanted, bedazzled, to the point of obsession with this profoundly moving image. Mellan's inscription seems to knowingly trade on his engraving's ambiguous status, how it flickers between artwork and icon: FORMATVR VNICVS VNA / NON ALTER (the unique one made by one / [like] no other). Here "one" fractures into a trinity of interpretations, signifying, at once, the singularity of Christ, the veil's irreproducible aura, and the unbroken aspect of a divine, spiraling line.

public-domain-review

Nov 2, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:32.107328

mont-blanc-ascent

The Ascent of Mont-Blanc (ca. 1855) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 7, 2021 Mont Blanc in the Alps, near the border of France, Italy, and Switzerland, had an unparalleled impact on the Romantic imagination. Percy Shelley refashioned Burke’s notion of the sublime within this mountain’s vale; Mary Shelley used its “awful majesty” to stage the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster; Wordsworth registered disappointment during The Prelude, finding that the peak left “a soulless image on the eye”; and — in typical form, chronicled by Fiona MacCarthy — Byron “jeered at an Englishwoman, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, whom he overheard asking the members of her party whether they had ever seen anything so rural, as if it were Highgate, Hampstead, Brompton or Hayes”. During the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, the mountain’s “blanc” became polysemous: white but also blank, a page on which to record “peak experiences”. It was not only poets who sought these treacherous climes. In the tradition of Lord Shaftesbury, who took an Alpine journey in the 1690s, the mountain became a touchstone for politics. As Peter H. Hansen discusses, the mountaineer Jacques Balmat made a contested first ascent in the 1780s, “suggesting resistance to the revolutionary mountain and ambivalence toward the French Empire”. In 1811, a “trigonometrical signal”, which looked alot like a cross, was constructed on the summit, engraved with the names of Napoleon, Balmat, and others, introducing religious iconography in the wake of the revolution’s iconoclasm. For curious Brits unable to traverse its precipices after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Mont Blanc was exported home in the form of entertainment (“The New Game of the Ascent of Mont Blanc”) and human curiosities. Albert Smith, whose ascent was exhibited in London’s Egyptian Hall, brought back a Bernese woman — in line with Thomas Gray’s 1739 proposition that mountain dwellers were spectacular, “Alpine monsters” — whom he introduced to Queen Victoria at Winsor, according to Alan McNee. Part of this mania for Mont Blanc was fueled by prints, like those made by George Baxter — the father of color printing — based on the sketches of John MacGregor, yet another courageous explorer to reach the summit. These four “views” capture a different, mid-century side of the mountain. We see, above all else, the impact of tourism on a mountain now reopened to Brits, engendered by the popularity of Romantic poetry, increased railway travel, and a notion that the Swiss Alps were conducive to Protestant encounters with God. In these views, the sublime has been swapped for l’heure bleue, that crepuscular moment of alpenglow, enjoyed in the company of fellow explorers. The four prints hold together as a progressive narrative of ascent. In the first, titled “The Glacier du Tacconay”, we see three vibrantly illustrated explorers hauling a fourth out of a deadly crevasse. In the background, two dozen figures are also present, but they have been completely desaturated, as if they are slowly merging into their icy environs. “Leaving the Grands Mulets” uses the same effect, but depicts a descent from pineconey peaks. A final print titled “The Summit” captures the heady exhaustion of a successful submit. A couple of explorers raise schnapps-sized glasses on a rounded dome of snow, while two others have almost collapsed from exhaustion. Beyond their visual impact, the prints came with a description that contains its own form of literary experimentation, demonstrating the waning influence of Romanticism on mountaineering. The preface focuses less on the individual, heroic explorer, more on collective expeditions and technical achievement. “Mules, guides and porters; ropes, knapsacks and ice axes; provisions, blue spectacles, firewood, gaiters, and iron-spiked shoes; —alpenstocks, green veils, and snow gloves (like large little babies’ gloves with a thumb and general finger).” There is a fun interplay between life and art, as if the painter might provide a kind of protection that crampons cannot. “See how the treacherous ice breaks: but the oil brush has just caught that falling man in time.” And we find a humorous acknowledgement that the mountain is now overlaid with the heavy impact of human life. “The spasmodic and quick repeated sound, ‘’ppahh,’ ‘’ppahh,’ of fifty smokers on Mont Blanc—could anybody sleep under it?”

public-domain-review

Oct 7, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:32.334503

perry-miscarriage

Joseph Perry’s Medical Illustrations of Miscarriage (1834) Text by Paloma Ruiz Nov 23, 2021 On an unrecorded day in 1827, a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy suffered her sixth, perhaps seventh miscarriage. In the remarks written on her case, it is said that she endured three premature losses for every two successful pregnancies, and “her general health was greatly impaired” in the process. Most likely, she labored between her sweat-soaked and blood-soiled bed sheets, with a midwife watching nearby. Maybe it was a warm morning, in a small home where the walls grew slick with condensation. Heavy breathing and humidity. Maybe the breath was hers, hurried, alongside that of several children huddled outside in the hallway. Maybe her husband kept as close as he could, grave with concern. Or maybe, after so many consecutive losses, he was left feeling almost unfazed. One thing is certain, the woman and the midwife went about their painful work. And when, with a final push, the gestational sac, embryo, and placenta were passed, the midwife promptly collected them and took leave. She hurried through the streets of London until she reached the workplace of the Italian doctor and author, Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783–1872). In the midst of perfecting his book, Graphic Illustrations of Abortion and Diseases of Menstruation, Granville summoned his engraver, Joseph Perry, to perpetuate these particular tissues of miscarriage in detailed, undiminished lithographic color. It now bears the title: Plate 2, Figure 12. Granville’s book is full of illustrations with similarly grim origins. Published in 1834, the terms abortion and miscarriage were still used somewhat interchangeably within the medical community. Granville himself asserts that his book deals solely with the losses that were spontaneous, a symptom of deeper illness or physiological dysfunction, and not those intentionally induced. Compiled over the course of roughly six years, it consists of twelve plates and upwards of forty figures. Figures which, in spite of the fact that fetal illustrations in utero were no longer particularly rare, are infused with a fantastical air of artistry. As part of his introduction, Granville makes note of Dr. William Hunter, author of Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures (1774), a compilation of black and white drawings based on the study of pregnant corpses. Hunter’s publication is extensive, intricate, and intimately detailed. Yet the monochrome, realist reproductions suffer from a starkness that Perry somehow circumvents. Most notably, Granville and Perry refrain from including illustrations of the women who died during troubled labors. Their bodies, rather than being nakedly displayed, are untouched by Perry’s pencil beyond the reproductive organs. Perhaps it is this focus on the isolated world of the embryo and fetus that makes each image feel so elusive, so aesthetically alien. And perhaps Granville reveals his affinity for this style when he quotes a fellow doctor: “It must be allowed that the generality of these things (the aborted ova) are preserved for their beauty, or as a matter of curiosity, rather than of use”. The illustrations become more than medical specimens, they are mementos, envisioning the organic beauty of the human body, as well as its brutality. To modern viewers, the context of medical confusion adds an extra layer of mystery to each image. Plate 1 is a compilation of floating amniotic sacs, suspended in water so as to preserve their three-dimensional shape during dissection. Leached of color, the layered membranes appear dark, arcane, and orbicular. Green-tinged tissue hangs off their surface like tendrils of moss. In Plate 4, we are confronted by a nebula of nearly indiscernible matter. Potentially the reproduction of a rare molar pregnancy, this illustration strives to show tissue layered in dangerous excess. Still more plates present a fetus nestled secretly in a woman’s left fallopian tube. Or resting, in almost tranquil repose, on the outside of her uterus. In this way, every image is an opportunity to investigate the beliefs and misunderstandings of nineteenth-century obstetrics. Each illustration is supported by a wealth of medical text: Granville’s explanations and remarks on the various cases he has encountered. The more elaborate these excerpts become, however, the clearer it is that Granville himself was still struggling to elucidate several aspects of reproduction. Given that most medical research up to this point was conducted on corpses, it is not surprising that there was lingering confusion over the act of conception. Granville acknowledges that fertilization takes place after sexual congress, but remains curiously quiet about the male’s role in this process, due to the contested role of spermatozoa in this period. He does, however, make frequent mention of Karl Ernst von Baer, a German scientist who served as a professor of zoology and anatomy at Konigsberg University. Baer had recently published Ovi Mammalian at Hominis genesi (1826), a book outlining his discovery of the mammalian ovum. It is clear then that Granville recognizes the female egg as a source of life, but he hits another scientific hurdle when he writes that fertilization of this egg takes place in the ovary rather than the uterus. Evidently, the mystery of conception still eluded explanation.

public-domain-review

Nov 23, 2021

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:32.810763

holkham-bible

The Holkham Bible Picture Book (ca. 1330) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 20, 2022 In 1816, William Roscoe — a Liverpudlian banker with an eye for art — wrote to Thomas William Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, in awe. The men had history. Forty years before, Coke inherited the library at Holkham Hall, which had been assembled, a century earlier, by his grand uncle Thomas Coke (1697–1759), whose family sent him abroad at fifteen to break a nasty cockfighting habit. It worked. By the time this elder Coke was twenty-one, he had plundered Padua, Lyons, Berlin, and most places in-between, buying “enough manuscripts and early printed books to form one of the finest private libraries in England”. After inheriting the library in 1776, Thomas Coke found it in a sorry state, with priceless books mildewed and pockmarked by worms. He sent nearly 750 volumes to Liverpool, where Roscoe had them cleaned and rebound. Now, in 1816, Roscoe was helping Coke grow his collection further by sourcing rarities from abroad. On offer was “a very curious MS. just brought here from the Continent. . . which I think one of the greatest curiosities I ever saw”. Thought to have been made in London, ca. 1330, this “curiosity” is now known as the Holkham Bible Picture Book, for it selectively illustrates the Old and New Testaments, taking us from Genesis to Revelation in a series of 231 beautifully executed miniatures. Among the many gleaming images we see: Adam and Eve on the outskirts of paradise, while a cherubim guards Eden’s gates with a carbuncle-colored sword; the flood, where Noah sends out dove and raven above a choppy sea — rendered in rolling streaks of blue and white — while the pale bodies of a man, woman, and horse sink into endless sleep; and the last supper, in which Christ and his apostles’ robes seem to coruscate on the page. The Holkham Bible’s miniatures knowingly employ luminance, an effect with both aesthetic and theological significance, through the technique known as “tinted drawing”. Making practical use of the translucent quality of vellum, these images were produced by applying paint in thin layers, preserving the material’s opacity and, in the right light, making it glow like a cathedral’s stained glass. We know very little about the original purpose of this book, beyond that the events are given a contemporary, medieval setting: the English agricultural “Plough Monday” is believed to be referenced in a depiction of Cain; coif caps abound; and Roman guards wield weapons and don armor distinctly Middle Aged. The Bible may have been commissioned by a Dominican friar, for the manuscript begins, unusually, with a friar commanding his artist to “do it well and thoroughly, for it will be shown to important people”. While it is referred to as a Bible, the relationship between text and image throughout is atypical, as the words often serve to caption the events depicted, rather than reproduce sacred text. Throughout this trilingual manuscript, written mostly in Anglo-Norman, English plays a minor but important role. The language only appears when connected to shepherds. In a humorous and cryptic miniature (f. 13), the annunciation gets lost in translation: “Gloria in excelsis”, intones the angel, but the shepherds do not speak Latin. “Glum glo. . .”, attempts one man, in a sloppy and guttural imitation, before admitting that he’s babbling nonsense (“ceo ne est rien”). A second scene on the same page shows the shepherds reaching the manger, where they look upon Mary, Joseph, and the child Christ. Suddenly, their speech transcends the limitations of language: these pastoral figures now sing perfect Latin, from scrolls that unroll off their tongues. “That shepherds at first cannot sing Latin is expected”, writes Richard K. Emmerson, “that they later can, is miraculous”. More miraculous still, Middle English codeswitches with Anglo-Norman in a style that recalls macaronic song. “Songen alle wid one steuene / Also the angel song that cam fro heuene: [Middle English] / ‘Te deum et Gloria.’ [Latin] / La contenance veyez cha [Anglo-Norman]”. As Christopher Baswell explains, this “musical, angelic Latin might well be the language of revelation” — what this bible’s wealthy, Anglo-Norman reading audience would expect — yet “the unique and explosive appearance” of Middle English works to authenticate the scene in a vernacular language that was gradually gaining literary and clerical prestige. “They all sang in one voice” (Songen alle wid one steuene) describes the choric song, but it also seems to point forward, toward the future of writing in England.

public-domain-review

Jan 20, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:33.325112

the-human-voice

The Human Voice (1921) Text by Adam Green Sep 21, 2021 This silent educational film from Bray Studios is all about that “marvellous sound producing instrument, the voice box”. Produced six years before the introduction of “talkies”, there's something pleasingly odd about a film dedicated to the mechanics of the human voice being entirely devoid of its subject matter — where the voiceover would soon boom we are treated to just the poignant silence of intertitles. Founded in 1912, Bray Productions was initially devoted to making animated series, including Max Fleischer's marvellous Out of the Inkwell series. During World War One, the studios moved mainly into producing education and training films, but its roots in animation were not forgotten and the technique was employed heavily in their new mission to explain and instruct. The Human Voice utilises a range of animations, often combining them with filmed footage of a man's head to reveal the subdermal mechanisms at play, and at one point we take a slightly terrifying “trip down ‘Throat Lane’” to find an animated glottis in song behind an overlaid stave.

public-domain-review

Sep 21, 2021

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:33.644385

snowball-fights

Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946) Text by Hunter Dukes Dec 8, 2021 Few seasonal activities are as universal — across time, place, or culture — as the snowball fight. As many of us head into the cold, winter months, hoping for a holiday season with frosted trees or icicles dripping like stalactites from the eaves of homes, we might also long for that slightly slushy grade of powder that makes for perfect packing. Snowmen and angels can be created later. And perhaps there will be sledding: on toboggans (for connoisseurs) or cafeteria trays (for the crafty). Yet nothing signals the year’s first snowfall quite like an apple-sized projectile cutting a parabolic path — through crisp evening air, the haloed light of streetlamps, and exhalations of foggy, illuminated breath — to make direct contact with an unsuspecting hat or coat. And yet, like snowballs themselves, which vanish upon impact into a mist of flakes, or melt on a hesitant mitten, which has missed its opportunity for ambush, snowball fights rarely last more than a few volleys (before dispersing toward cocoa) and are rarely preserved beyond the fleeting memories of individuals, friends, or families. But certain significant battles make it into the annals of history. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, as the saying goes, the Battle of Austerlitz may have been planned on the snow banks of La Brienne. According to what might be more fable than history, the teenage Napoleon Bonaparte famously organized a ten day snowball fight at this military school, complete with trenches, regimens, and rules of engagement (although, according to his classmate Bourrienne’s memoirs, the combatants eventually worked their way down to gravel and stones beneath the snow, until “besiegers as well as besieged, were seriously wounded”) . University magazines tend to preserve storied skirmishes on quadrangles. A particularly pyrrhic 1891 battle at Smith College in Massachusetts was still being debated in the women’s college’s monthly magazine half a decade later. When University of Edinburgh students engaged local residents in a salvo of hard-packed lobs, a battle broke out that lasted two days, now known as the 1838 snowball riots, which led to violent suppression by armed police (brandishing weapons heavier than frozen water) and dozens of arrests. In protest, students quickly published an extensive (and, in parts, extremely insensitive) piece of campus humor titled The University Snowdrop. “The noblest theme of the noblest poets, in all ages, has been WAR”, begins the preface, before advancing the thesis that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were “the evident result of a snow-ball fight at the village of Troy in Asia Minor”. While narratives and poetry might recreate the arc of engagement, the visual arts can freeze the scene of a snowball fight for all time. Some of the earliest, preserved images of snowball fights come from medieval books of hours — illuminated, devotional manuscripts with calendrical elements — and almost always feature on pages dedicated to the month of December. Later, we find snowballs as details in larger landscapes. In Lucas van Valckenborch’s majestic Winterlandschaft (1586), airborne orbs mix with heavy snowfall represented by palette-knife impasto across a village scene. What’s wondrous about browsing the images gathered below is how little changes across centuries and continents — like landscapes blanketed with powder, difference fades in the snow fight. A fifteenth-century fresco from Trento, Italy, reveals combatants with arms cocked back (and one unfortunate recipient of a headshot), wearing expressions of minorly-sadistic pleasure or intentions for revenge — postures nearly identical to Utagawa Kunisada (I)’s woodcut snowball scenes (ca. 1825) or to those of the schoolchildren in mass combat depicted by Fritz Freund’s nineteenth-century The Snowball Fight. Subthemes emerge in the snow-fight genre: the ball about to be launched at an unaware target, such as in Anthonij van der Haer’s mid-eighteenth century engraving, and the angry aftermath of ambush, as seen in a 1904 print from Springfield, Massachusetts captioned “Whose afraid”. There are often invocations of the viewer, either as teammate — such as the jolly, beckoning baller in Cornelis Dusart’s Maart (ca. 1690) — or as opponent, as in a heavily-colored photograph from 1920s Norway of a girl in Sámi dress playfully threatening whomever meets her gaze. And, like in all sport, there are politics and wargames. A photograph from 1923 captures a snow battle between Democrat and Republican page boys in front of the US Capitol building, while a 1946 photograph, shot from an overhead angle, records members of the Women’s Army Corps entrenched against some unseen rivals. If there is a chance of snowfall in your part of the world, we wish you good aim and fast reflexes this holiday season.

public-domain-review

Dec 8, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:34.023090

babb-photographs

Theresa Babb’s Photographs of Friendship (ca. 1898) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 16, 2021 Camden, Maine is one of two places on the East Coast “where the mountains meet the sea”, writes Barbara F. Dyer, a local historian. Photographing its harbor and hills at the turn of the twentieth century, Theresa Babb (1868–1948) recorded both the intimacies of social life and her hometown’s industrial and seafaring traditions. What stands out most about Babb’s images is how they let us glimpse into a personal world of female friendship, captured in such a way that seems both timeless and strikingly modern. In The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, Marilyn Yalom describes the rise of the “new woman” in the late-nineteenth century, whose education, race, and class position created “a new model of friendship” that was “to last for much of the twentieth century”. She quotes a woman interviewed during this rise: “We live for our friends, and at bottom for no other reason.” Babb’s portraits do not fall neatly into this history, but certainly share the quoted sentiment. The groups of women she photographed are neither fully focused on the ennobling, moral uplift associated with “the serious New Woman” nor anticipatory of the “carefree flapper” that was to follow. Instead, we find joyful depictions of friendship among women, often on countryside outings, during a decade in US history remembered as “the gay nineties”. In the image above, Babb and three friends drink, heads thrown back, while lounging on a rocky shore. A fifth woman stares off toward the water, either comically posed in feigned disapproval or simply lost in thought. Several other images continue the theme, reflecting the pleasures of posing in groups. In a photograph captioned “Camping crowd at Ogier Point”, four women lean on each other, pulling faces for the camera; another image depicts friends and family of Babbs stacked on a ladder, with her sister, Grace Parker, on top. Babb’s chosen angles make these 120-year-old images feel remarkably contemporary. Photographing “some of Miss Garland’s girls” in Milton, Massachusetts in 1900, Babb places her camera near to the ground and eight women, seated on grass, peer down toward the lens. In another image, young people swim in the sea, while Babb seems to be floating on a boat, with her camera trained back toward shore. The activities are numerous: dancing, picnicking, dog walking, dinner parties, photography, bicycling, child care, hammocking, and naps on the beach are all represented. Spending time with these images, we start to feel as if we know Theresa Babb. And yet, in terms of biographical information, we know very little. Her husband was the treasurer of Knox Woolen Mill, Charles W. Babb, and her son, Charles Jr., succeeded in the family business, becoming President of the mill. On the envelopes that house the negatives of these photographs, Theresa Babb wrote detailed captions, small missives to some future onlooker.

public-domain-review

Nov 16, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:34.500088

clavis-artis

Clavis Artis by “Zoroaster” Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 30, 2021 Much like the images it contains, the three-volume Clavis Artis remains a mystery of nearly unchartable depths. We know this much: the alchemical manuscript was published in Germany, sometime between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, although its title page claims it is thirteenth century (and written on dragon skin). Few copies exist and even fewer are illustrated — and one was incinerated, as if by dragon’s breath, during the 2004 fire at Weimar’s Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek. The authorship is unknown, but the manuscript declares itself to be a translation of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra): the ancient Persian prophet and founder of the Zoroastrian religion. The images focused on in this post come from a copy of the manuscript held at Trieste’s Biblioteca Civica Attilio Hortis, while another version — with illustrations of almost identical content but in a less “naïve” style — can be found at Rome’s Lincean Academy (or, reading its Italian name literally: the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed). Even the most keen-eyed and erudite occultist may find themselves adrift in these dense, hermetic images. Part of the reason for this, aside from thematic content (infanticide, a nude woman using a crescent moon like a proto-hovercraft, and scenes that look — to a contemporary viewer — like interspecies French kissing) stems from the illustrations’ nearly unparsable tone. In perhaps the most disturbing image, two mustached soldiers hold children upside down over a well, using long daggers to filet their legs. The men seem posed for our gaze. A kneeling woman observes, hands clasped, perhaps in prayer, but her face may easily be read as rapturous. Dragons, lions, and serpents appear frequently across the manuscript and the alchemical symbols for elements and planetary metals often graffiti the landscape, with mercury (☿) coming to the fore. In a somewhat comical scene, a man (possibly Zoroaster himself) looks to the sky, concerned, as a shooting star approaches a brick tower with flames blazing from its chimney. Distracted by the heavens, it appears that the man has momentarily forgotten that he is feeding some kind of giant lizard, perched on a pedestal, greedily guzzling carmine liquid from a rounded decanter. Guity Novin, in her History of Graphic Design, quotes the eighteenth-century English occultist Francis Barrett, who links Zoroastrianism and alchemy — present most palpably in the Clavis Artis through everpresent primordial dyads: light and dark, fire and water, sun and moon (often personified): “Zoroaster was the father of alchymy, illumined divinely from above; he knew every thing, yet seemed to know nothing; his precepts of art were left in hieroglyphics, yet in such sort that none but the favorites of Heaven ever reaped ben­e­fit thereby”. Like the second half of Barrett’s description of Zoroaster, we seem to know almost nothing about this manuscript, but the scholarly history is young. The edition held in Rome was rediscovered by the composer Nino Rota (who scored Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather) in an antiquarian bookshop in the 1970s. The mysteries seem only to proliferate when it comes to the Clavis Artis. You can browse images from the Trieste copy below and see those from the Roman copy here (the latter set).

public-domain-review

Nov 30, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:34.960781

dore-new-zealander

“When London is in Ruins”: Gustave Doré’s The New Zealander (1872) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 26, 2021 Famous for depicting worlds beyond our own — his illustrations of The Divine Comedy are inseparable from how we now view Dante’s epic — the French artist Gustave Doré (1832–1883) set himself a new task in 1869: to document the scenes of everyday London life. Collaborating with the British journalist Blanchard Jerrold (1826–1884), Doré spent countless days and nights drifting across the capital, protected by plain-clothes police, while visiting opium dens, squalid lodging houses, and dim pubs. After four years, the pair published London: A Pilgrimage, complete with 180 wood engravings by Doré. Critics were not kind in their reviews of the volume, because many felt it was itself not a kind review of London: depicting extremes instead of medians, working in the tradition of William Hogarth’s city scenes, but draining them of moral and satirical content. Critiques aside, there is a more curious history to uncover here. In the final plate, Doré slips into a metaphysical mode, depicting London in a ruinous style that looks more like John Martin’s illustrations of Pandemonium than a lively city on the Thames. London Bridge has fallen down and, in the midst of this unreal city, a veiled figure sits lit by moonlight, aside the derelict “Commercial Wharf” — where sedge has begun to rewild the urban environment — sketching the remains of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which looks like it has been snapped in half. Its title? “The New Zealander”. This image frames the entire series. Writing in his preface, Jerrold quotes Wordsworth and lapses nostalgic: the pilgrimage was conceived “in the happier days of France, when war seemed nearly as far off from Paris as the New Zealander appears to be still from the ruins of London bridge”. Who was this New Zealander? Largely forgotten today, he was so omnipresent in the 1860s as to be labeled cliché. An 1865 issue of Punch magazine, for example — explored by both David Skilton and David Runciman — proposed banning the use of “certain persons, objects and things, part of the stock-in-trade of sundry literary chapman”. At the head of this list we find “Macaulay’s New Zealander”: “The retirement of this veteran is indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when London is in ruins.” The trope is often traced back to the British statesman and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), for whom the vision of a fallen London in some near future served as a cautionary bit of rhetoric repurposed toward various ends. In an 1829 review of Essays on Government by James Mill, for example, Macaulay describes a vision akin to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Is it possible that, in two or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities—may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?” In 1840, he narrowed these cities to London during a review of Leopold von Ranke on papal history, contrasting the New Zealander with the endurance of Catholicism amidst cataclysm: unlike London’s iconic Anglican cathedral, the Catholic church “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's". Although Doré was likely referencing this version of the New Zealander, the allegorical figure did not necessarily originate with Macaulay. The New Zealand based Cornish missionary William Colenso, presenting a paper at the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute in 1882, found an equivalent image in “works, without doubt, [that] Macaulay must have seen and even read”. Horace Walpole, for instance, in a published 1744 letter, suggests a time when “some curious traveller from Lima, will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the Editions of Baalbec and Palmyra”. (Colenso notes that Macaulay wrote “a slashingly trenchant” review of Walpole’s letters.) Other predecessors include Volney, Henry Kirke White, Percy Shelley, and — demonstrating the depth of Colenso’s sleuthing — “the able preface to the English 4th edition of La Billardiere’s celebrated Voyage”, which predicts that “New Zealand may produce her Lockes, her Newtons, and her Montesquieus. . . [and send] navigators, philosophers, and antiquaries, to contemplate the ruins of ancient London”. Others think the origin might come from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1825), a work about London even less popular than Doré and Jerrold’s Pilgrimage, which envisioned the capital flattened by the Napoleonic wars. Controversial in origin, the image becomes even more complex when trying to fix an interpretation, as its meaning permutates beyond Macaulay. Consider Winston Churchill, who, commenting on ancient civilizational ruins in India, wondered if “the traveler shall some day inspect, with unconcerned composure, the few scraps of stone and iron, which may indicate the British occupation of India.” Part of the New Zealander’s enduring pleasure, then, comes from a kind of Ozymandian irony, fully present in the Churchill — “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yet wait long enough and, sure enough, despair will decay into something like bathos. More curious, perhaps, is the New Zealander’s journey from colony to metropole, which plays on the tradition of educated and moneyed Europeans capping their studies with a Grand Tour to see the ruins of classical civilization. It also predicts, in a sense, the anxieties of “reverse colonization” that fester in the British imagination across the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prominent in alien invasion narratives and employed for dramatic effect by Louise Bennett Coverley, for instance, in her 1966 poem “Colonization in Reverse”. The science fiction novel most indebted to Macaulay’s idea is William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880), written in an epistolary style from Tapuaeharuru, Taupo, N.Z. in 1942, looking back at the fall of London to pollution and vice. In Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (2021), Nikki Hessell further complicates questions of fiction and history, by tracking how an extract from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) was published by Rēweti Tūhorouta Kōhere as a bilingual text in 1926, designed to introduce anglophone literature to Māori readers, and perhaps inspired the kind of travel envisioned by the statesman. Against the critical tradition that perceives Macaulay’s New Zealander to be a settler returning to a collapsed imperial center, Hessel notes that, in the 1840s, the term would have invoked a Māori pilgrim. “Macaulay’s Māori was mobile, traversing not only the geographic space between England and Aotearoa New Zealand and the temporal space between the flourishing empire and its inevitable fall, but also the cultural space between Indigenous and European art forms.”

public-domain-review

Oct 26, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:35.424321

buddhist-texts-for-the-illiterate

Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 12, 2022 In the introduction to Elaborations on Emptiness (1996), Donald S. Lopez, Jr. recounts a Japanese story called “Miminashi Hōichi”, about a blind biwa minstrel who can recite the epic thirteenth-century Tale of Heike by heart (a chronicle that exceeds eight hundred pages in its English translation). One day, the young man is approached by the servant of a lord, who asks to hear the concluding episode performed, wherein the last samurai of the Heike bloodline is executed — a segment alone that requires seven nights of recitation. His first six installments are a great success. But before the final session, it is discovered that the blind singer was tricked: he has not been visiting a noble temple in the evenings, as he thought, but an empty graveyard, where the ghosts of the Heike clan have been listening to the painful history of their demise. Like Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, who must tell stories to stay alive, the boy realizes that when his tale ends, he too will die. To save him, local monks paint the Buddhist Heart Sūtra across his body, which makes him invisible to the ghosts. But the monks forget to calligraph his ears. That night, the spectral samurai slice his lobes to shreds, leaving only holes, and thus the blind bard became known as Miminashi Hōichi — Hōichi the Earless. It is hard to find a moral in this stomach-churning scene. Yet it reflects a belief regarding the Sūtras and other texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism: what these words mean may be just as important as what they can do: offer protection, through apotropaic invocation, and grant enlightenment. “It was agreed among many Buddhist scholars”, writes Claudia Marra in reference to Japanese Buddhism, “that Sūtras, even if not understood, but recited with faith, would eventually lead to enlightenment, since only the language of the Sūtras had the power to cut through illusions and enlighten the faithful”. The bloody climax of “Miminashi Hōichi”, then, may reflect — in graphic and physicalized terms — not only the armoring power of sacred language, but also the Heart Sūtra’s primary theme: cutting through the illusory nature of perception and knowledge itself. If incantatory texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism work through recitation, are the illiterate barred from enlightenment, should they lack the supreme linguistic recall of Hōichi? The answer requires knowing more about literacy and language in Japan. The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early-modern era, with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sutra recitation (dokyō) becoming an artform in the following century. Charlotte Eubanks tells the story of Emperor Goshirakawa, who supposedly incinerated a wing of the imperial palace after mispronouncing “a single character of the Lotus Sutra”. This is to say, even for the literate, the Buddhist scriptures could be vast palimpsests of code-switches and calques. First of all, most East Asian canons of sacred Buddhist texts — known as Tripitaka and venerated by practitioners in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan — have long been written in Classical Chinese. As Greg Wilkinson notes, for those who can read this Tripitaka, the canon’s lack of punctuation, the tonal requirements of Chinese, and the presence of Sanskrit transliteration, makes it “very difficult to understand for a Japanese reader without special knowledge and training”, and almost as difficult to pronounce “correctly”, given the variation in dialects and vernacular speech across the archipelago. In order to circumvent these issues in the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable, akin to how the emoji sequence 👁 🅰️ ◀️ 🚍 approximates the phonetics of “I read a rebus” (I + “red A” + “re” + “bus”). Famously, the Japanese physician, scholar, and travel writer Tachibana Nankei (1753–1805) reproduced an early example of a Heart Sūtra for the illiterate in his 1795 Travelogue of East and West (Tōzai yūki). As these texts were often most used in rural, agricultural regions, the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death. “Villagers, decoding these pictures and pronouncing them aloud in their local dialect”, writes Eubanks, “would thus produce sounds similar to those pronounced by educated clerics”. Furthermore, the presumed incantatory and magical power of an esoteric teaching, in a nearly incomprehensible language, coupled the sounds and promises of spirituality to the visual realm of everyday life. The rebus-style text featured at the very top of this post, held by the British Library, dates to the early twentieth century, demonstrating the continued relevance of this reading technology across a modernizing Japan. It is labeled by the British Library as an edition of the Heart Sūtra (Hannya shingyō), but the Library of Congress, which holds a copy of the same text, names it as the “Hymn of Praise to Kannon for the Illiterate” (Kannon mekura wasan). Although the bodhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteśvara), who embodies compassion, offers teachings in the Heart Sūtra, this hymn (wasan) is distinct from the Heart Sūtra as well as the other sutras rendered according to this rebus-principle, such as the Lotus Sūtra. Below, you can browse pages from a much earlier Heart Sūtra for the illiterate (ca. 1800), courtesy of Williams College. Also, on the theme of religious rebus texts, check out this 1908 pictographic bible designed for children.

public-domain-review

Jan 12, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:35.935837

unkindo-kimono-designs

Designs from Kimono Pattern Books (ca. 1902) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 3, 2021 “Kimono”, which translates to “wearing thing” in Japanese, is both a modern invention and a millennium-old style. Becoming the kimono we know today only during the Meiji period (1868–1912), this garment, details Cynthia Green, developed from the Edo kosode, which, in turn, was a revised form of clothing popular during the Heian period (794–1192). In these images from three pattern books published by Honda Unkindō (ca. 1902), we glimpse both evolving tradition and modern fictions, which imbued the kimono with complex associations of national heritage. These particular books were printed following a late-nineteenth century boom in Kyoto kimono production, for use as guides by both consumers and designers. As Terry Satsuki Milhaupt describes in her study of the modern kimono, this was an era when the kimono’s symbolic association with “traditional Japan” became explicit, due, primarily, to the Meiji government relaxing the Edo period’s stricter social hierarchy and isolationism. With increasingly porous social and international borders, fashion underwent an upheaval as Western clothing rapidly became a shorthand for modernization. Against this backdrop, the kimono also modernized, but its modernism presented as tradition. When government officials began to wear suits and uniforms, “Kimono-clad females emerged as symbols of cultural continuity and preservers of the nation’s sartorial heritage”. As is often the case, national mythmaking was built on the back of global exchange. The newfound textile technologies used to produce these heritage-heavy garbs became possible thanks to Japanese delegations collaborating with the United States and Europe to research dyeing technologies. Bound in the fukurotoji style on stitched double leaves, the pattern books consist of coloured woodblock prints, which represent designs attributed to Ueno Seikō, a practitioner of yūzen-style dyeing. This process is a subclass of “resist dyeing”, which uses rice-paste to form a sticky outline, giving shape and pattern to the applied colour. While yūzen is a practice that stretches back to the eighteenth century – when it first allowed for pictorial designs to be laid directly onto fabric – kata–yūzen, in which dyed paste is applied through stencils, was only perfected toward the end of the nineteenth century. With this new process, derived from intellectual collaboration with scientists from other nations, kimono production could be increasingly industrialized. If these design albums exhibit a certain aesthetic flare, it may have emerged from brotherly competition. During the period in which they were produced, the Unkindō publishing company — known by this name from ca. 1889, though an offshoot of the Honda family’s longstanding book-binding business — entered a tradecraft rivalry with the Unsōdō company, also of the Honda family. After these relatives merged their companies in 1906, the publisher’s pattern books became self-conscious works of art. As Teruko Hayamitsu, a curator at the still-extant Unsōdō company, writes: “They focussed on works for the kimono industry, producing lavish publications which used not only traditional colour woodblock printing but also cutting-edge technology of the day such as collotype-printed photographic plates and heliotype colour plates.” Produced just before the merger, when competition was fierce, these images evince refined woodblock techniques and complex, decorative grammars. One catalogue makes extensive use of abstraction and negative space, with maple leaves falling in patterns from a salmon-colored sky and cranes taking flight out of a lightless sea. Two other catalogues dial back the abstraction into small, stirring scenes of the natural world. Here we see themes reminiscent of ukiyo-e — fractal, geometric water patterns; snowy boughs spread from a serpentine trunk — and festive repetitions of speckled paper fans. Below you can see a selection of highlights from the three pattern books digitised by the Smithsonian, and you can see another held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here.

public-domain-review

Nov 3, 2021

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:36.244361

robert-browning-attempting-to-recite-how-they-brought-the-good-news-from-ghent-to-aix-1889

Robert Browning attempting to recite ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ (1889) Mar 16, 2012 The voice of great English poet, Robert Browning (1812 - 1889) recorded while at a dinner party given by Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, on April 7th, 1889. The sales manager of Edison Talking machine, Colonel Gouraud, had brought with him a phonograph to show the guests and to record their voices. Browning, though reluctant at first, eventually gives in and begins to recite his poem 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'. Unfortunately, he "cannot remember me own verses" and gives up going on to expressing how he certainly won't forget though this "wonderful invention". He was to die just under 8 months later. When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave." I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he;I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;'Speed' echoed the wall to us galloping through...'Speed' echoed the...Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest... I'm terribly sorry but I can't remember me own verses,but one thing that I shall remember all me life is the astonishing [inaudible] by your wonderful invention. Robert Browning! [other voices]Bravo, bravo, bravo.Hip, hip, hooray.Hip, hip, hooray.Hip, hip, hooray.Bravo.

public-domain-review

Mar 16, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:37.118665

kid-auto-races-at-venice-1914

Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) Apr 3, 2012 This Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice, released on 7 February 1914, was only Charlie Chaplin's second ever appearance on film and the screen debut of his famous Tramp character. Although it was the first film released involving the Tramp, Chaplin had actually devised the outfit for the film Mabel's Strange Predicament produced a few days earlier but released a couple days after Kid Auto Races at Venice, on 9 February 1914. Mack Sennett had requested that Chaplin "get into a comedy make-up". As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography: I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born. In The Kid Auto Races at Venice Chaplin takes the Tramp to the races where he annoys a director, who is trying to film there, by continuously trying to sneak into shot.

public-domain-review

Apr 3, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:37.609432

the-selection-of-type-is-just-as-important-as-the-selection-of-words-1939

The Selection Of Type Is Just As Important As The Selection Of Words (1939?) Feb 27, 2012 An "Alphabetical Index to Type Faces" from the G.A. Davis Printing Company. What it says on the tin, but also generator of bizarre 'accidental' sentences such as "Summer-time with outdoor pleasures become flowers with nature", "Domestic animals are nuisance when a hurry to men", "Strong type faces used cold north winds" and the occasional poem: "History repeats itself as the years pass / Internal injuries are weakening / Injurious statements make yonder river flows fast". NB: The publishing date of 1900 given in the Internet Archive link appears to be incorrect, with some of the typefaces not being invented until the mid-30s. There is no indication of publishing date on the scanned copy itself, though there is a Library of Toronto stamp dated October 1939.

public-domain-review

Feb 27, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:38.209988

lucy-isabelle-marsh

Lucy Isabelle Marsh Mar 1, 2012 American singer Lucy Isabelle Marsh (1878 – 1956) made her career as a professional recording artist for the Victor Talking Machine Company. She was an anonymous mainstay of the regular recording program of the company from 1909 into the late 1920s, while at the same time, she quickly won popular and critical recognition under her own name as a major artist on Victor recordings. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Mar 1, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:38.648593

original-acrostics-on-all-the-states-and-presidents-of-the-united-states-and-various-other-subjects-1868

Original Acrostics on all the States and Presidents of the United States, and Various Other Subjects (1868) Feb 21, 2012 As well as acrostics for all the states and presidents, Robert Blackwell provides ones for a host of other topics including the Moon, Whisky and the Ladies of Nashville. And just in case you thought it is was easy work, a little note from the author... [Gentlemen.] GRANT me one favor, I ask no more,Examine all my writings o'er;Not forgetting all the timeTis hard to make a name to rhyme.Let those who think they can composeExcellent verse as well as prose,Make one effort to be wise,Ere they scoff and criticiseNumerous works they would revise.

public-domain-review

Feb 21, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:39.153813

the-beatus-of-facundus-1047

The Beatus of Facundus (1047) Apr 9, 2012 In the 8th century, in a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, 700 years after the Book of Revelation was written, a monk named Beatus set down to illustrate a collection of writings he had compiled about this most vivid and apocalyptic of the New Testament books. Throughout the next few centuries his depictions of multi-headed beasts, decapitated sinners, and trumpet blowing angels, would be copied over and over again in various versions of the manuscript. Below is a selection of images from one such manuscript known as the Beatus de Facundus (or Beatus de León), dating to 1047 and painted by a man called Facundus for Ferdinand I and Queen Sancha. It is composed of 312 leaves and 98 miniatures. John Williams, author of The Illustrated Beatus, explores more in his article for The Public Domain Review, "Beatus of Liébana".

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:39.624335

some-account-of-a-sheep-having-a-monstrous-horn-growing-from-his-throat-1755

Some Account of a Sheep Having a Monstrous Horn Growing from His Throat (1755) Apr 9, 2012 An account of the presenting before The Royal Society in London of a sheep which had a gigantic horn growing out from his neck.

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:40.086810

dog-factory-1904

Dog Factory (1904) Feb 15, 2012 A rather dark and bizarre Edison short. Two men are operating a 'dog factory', using a device that they call a Dog Transformator. A man brings three dogs into their shop, which they purchase from him. They place the dogs one by one into the machine, which turns each dog into a string of sausages. As their customers come in, they are then able to select the kind of dog that they want, and the machine changes the corresponding string of sausages back into a dog.

public-domain-review

Feb 15, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:40.515199

photographs-of-the-famous-by-felix-nadar

Photographs of the Famous by Felix Nadar Mar 7, 2012 Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1 April 1820, Paris – 20 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. He took his first photographs in 1853 and pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris. Around 1863, Nadar built a huge (6000 m³) balloon named Le Géant ("The Giant"), thereby inspiring Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon. Although the "Géant" project was initially unsuccessful Nadar was still convinced that the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines. Later, "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" was established, with Nadar as president and Verne as secretary. Nadar was also the inspiration for the character of Michael Ardan in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. In April 1874, he lent his photo studio to a group of painters, thus making the first exhibition of the Impressionists possible. (Wikipedia) For more photographs by Nadar see source below.

public-domain-review

Mar 7, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:40.860965

an-account-of-a-fire-ball-seen-at-hornsey-by-william-hirst-1753

An Account of a Fire-Ball, Seen at Hornsey, by William Hirst (1753) Apr 9, 2012 "I was then going down the hill adjoining to the south side of Hornsey-church, and was not a little surprised to find myself suddenly surrounded by a light equal to that of the full moon, though the moon (which was then four days old) had been set about fifty minutes."

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:41.320400

a-theory-of-pure-design-harmony-balance-rhythm-1907

A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (1907) Apr 4, 2012 A book detailing the science behind harmony, balance, and rhythm in art. The author, Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), was an American painter, art collector, and professor of art at Harvard University. From the preface: The terms and principles of Art have, as a rule, been understood by the artist in the form of technical processes and visual images, not in words. It is in words that they will become generally understood. It is in words that I propose to explain them in this book. I want to bring to definition what, until now, has not been clearly defined or exactly measured. In a sense this book is a contribution to Science rather than to Art. It is a contribution to Science made by a painter, who has used his Art in order to understand his Art, not to produce Works of Art. In a passage of Plato (Philebus, ^f 55) Socrates says: "If arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken out of any art, that which remains will not be much."

public-domain-review

Apr 4, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:40:41.752826