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“Lesser Light Rules the Night…”—an Early Picture of Multiple Universes?

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Blank and Empty Things #56

This sort-of famous image, found in a French Bible Mortalisee made in Reims in the 13^th century,

displays The Creator measuring its creation, a sphere of the universe containing all of the stuff of creation, and including the Earth (pictured at upper right).  At least that is what I think this is—Creator stepping into the frame (its right foot outside the drawn border of the image), holding everything that it has made, and holding it all in the midst of another environment of some sort.  What that place might actually be, I don’t know.  Is that the space in-between the light created on the fourth day (pictured below from Schedel’s so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493), the space that wasn’t the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night?  In this spirit it was the stars that were supposed to separate these two lights, but the stars themselves in many of the concentric circle cosmologies weren’t part of the Heavenly sphere itself, which is what the Reim’s illustrations seems to say.  I suppose that it is all simply displayed somewhere in the OT, but from where I sit right now, this looks like a painfully early Western image of multiple universes. 

The other thing is:  what is the Creator looking at?  It is definitely very focused and wide-eyed, and is lasered on something about half of the diameter of the universe to the right, just on the other side of the dividers. Is this the biggest of the Blank and Empty Things that can be imagined? 

Beautiful Title Pages 7: Gorgeous Design for Childen by Christoph Weigel, 1726

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"O Babees yonge, my Book only is made for youre lernynge” says what well may be the first book made in the West for children, written in the 14th century.  It was made for the eyes of noble blood, of course, and was basically a contribution towards how the children should act and behave, rather than teaching them anything outside of their immediate interactions with each other or their parents.  Books of manner and behavior was the dominant—if perhaps the only(?)—category of books for children until the late 16th century.

John Locke, in his Thoughts on Education (1691), suggests that "when a child begins to read, some easy, pleasant book, like Aesop's Fables or Reynard the Fox, with pictures if possible, should be put into his hands". He adds, "What other books there are in English of the kind above-mentioned, fit to engage the liking of children, and tempt them to read, I do not know, but am apt to think, that children, being generally delivered over to the method of schools, where the fear of the rod is to enforce, and not any pleasure of the employment to invite them to learn, this sort of useful books, amongst the number of silly ones that are of all sorts, yet have had the fate to be neglected; and nothing that I know has been considered of this kind out of the ordinary road of the hornbook, primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." (This quote from C.M. Watkins article in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880.)

Perhaps the most beautiful of early books for children is found behind this deeply designed title page, brought to us by Christoph Weigel (German, 1654-1726), the author, illustrator and engraver of Die Welt in einer Nuss oder die Historien vom Aufgang der Welt…¹ published in Nurnberg in 1726.  The book was a tall, thin production, with 16 pages of text and 43 engraved plates, much like this one, emblazoned with emblematic studies and dedicated to a particular point in the historical continuum.  And it was intended, believe it or not, for children—the title can be basically translated as “The World in a Nutshell” and was absolutely intended for kids, compressing all of the human story into 16 terse pages and a whole bunch of gorgeous illustration. This image shows the second millennium after the birth of Christ, illustrated with seven engravings (secula septem).

Notes:

1. Weigel, Christoph: Die Welt in einer Nuß oder Die Historien vom Anfang Der Welt samt deren Zeit-Rechnung bis auff unsere Zeit auf eine besondere und ganz leichte Art kurz zusammen zufassen oder ausgebreitet in einem Augenblick auf einer einigen Tafel zu wiederhohlen, fürgeschrieben und fürgebildet. [Nürnberg]: 1726

A short timeline of Early Children’s Literature:

Orbis Pictus (1658) by John Amos Comenius: perhaps the first book of stories written for children to be illustrated. 

Charles Perrault, the inventor, perhaps of the new genre of the fairy tale,  wrote (in the 1660’s-1690’s) tales that include Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (Puss in Boots), Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de vair (Cinderella), La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fées (Diamonds and Toads), La Marquise de Salusses ou la Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda), Les Souhaits ridicules (The Ridiculous Wishes), Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin) and Riquet à la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft).  Some of the stories were simple, some not; some were hard, some not.  Reading the originals (or close to them) and reading them fully leaves them outside my taste, especially for kids.

A Token for Children. Being An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of several Young Children (1672) by James Janeway. One of the first books specifically written for children and which shaped much eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing for kids--as you can tell, not a happy go.  Its a wonder we're all not dead.

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan (1678):  Christian allegory serving as a model for many more such works to come.

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) by John Newbery: avery early book of really nothing but fun and a few promos.

The Governess; Or, Little Female Academy (1749) by Sarah Fielding: Often described as the first novel for children

Lessons for Children (1778-9) by Anna Laetitia Barbauld.  A best-selling book series made for little and grubby hands, easy to hold, wide margins and easy to read and adaptable to different age groups. 

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm also Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859). Myths and stories told without holding back on what might cause years' worth of nightmares. Very tough going by today's standards. Very.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) fairy tale-ist,  "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling"; storie smore suited for a kinder and more comfortable bedtime once th elights go out.

The Devil in the Mirror, ca. 1560

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There’s plenty of interesting images in the Renaissance and Baroque featuring images caught as reflection in a mirror, none more famous I guess than Van Eyck's marriage scene (which I’ve written about several times in this blog, most recently in "Original Reflections: unique experiences with mirrors, Van Eyck and Brunellesci, here).  What is unusual here is that we see the Devil in the mirror (actually the devil’s hindquarters), which to my experience is very uncommon. Also I thought the phraselet “the Devil in the Mirror/Mirrour” was well used and worn, but, as it turns out, it is hardly so, though there’s a near-alphabet of things that the devil could be in. 

For example, when looking through FirstSearch/WorldCat (a massive catalogue of books in libraries world wide and a cataloguing librarian’s best friend) for the things that a devil might be in, as in the phrase “the devil in the ____” we find the devil in a belfry, book (a Dalton Trumbo novel!), bush, candle, cheese, classroom, cross, dark, details, drain, desert, deep blue sun, flesh, fog, gateway, hills, junior league, kitchen, Middle Ages, milk, modern world, mountain, New World, shape of a woman.  The devil in the mirror turns out only to be so in a song. 

None of this amounts to a hill of  ____  (beans, cocoa, molasses, moolah, fritos), but I found it unusual that the phrase and the whole devil-in-a-mirror idea to be so scarce.  Unless he can’t be seen in a mirror….No wait, that’s a vampire

I know I'm wasting this image with this trivial pursuit when a decent writer would be looking at Satan over the ages, or its virtual non-appearance in the Bible, or the different names of the devil or its infernal helpers, and its other unholy images, or the history of Hell itself., or of the history of guilt, or fear (see Jeff Donlan's lovely appraisal of Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear, which doesn't really have anything to do with the devil but is a great idea) or temptation, or general unacknowledged dark worry.  I just stuck to the picture. 

This naturally leads to looking at some antiquarian book titles involving devils and the nonsense and hokum that they got into.  Here’s a few lovely examples of titles-as-long-as-opening-paragraphs; it seems that the less old they are the less detailed they become.  But I’m probably wrong about that, too. 

The displaying of supposed witchcraft : wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests or the like, is utterly denied and disproved ; Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sydereal spirits, the force of charms, and philters; with other abstruse matters / 
Author: Webster, John, 1610-1682.

War with the devil, or, The young mans conflict with the powers of darkness in a dialogue : discovering the corruption and vanity of youth, the horrible nature of sin, and deplorable condition of fallen man : also a definition, power, and rule of conscience, and the nature of true conversion : to which is added an appendix containing a dialogue between an old apostate and a young professor, worthy the perusal of all, but chiefly intended for the instruction of the younger sort / 
Author: Keach, Benjamin, 1640-1704.

A Whip for the Devil, or, The Roman conjuror discovering the intolerable folly, prophaneness and superstition of the papists in endeavouring to cast the Devil out of the bodies of men and women by him possest ... / 1683

I find these title strangely satisfying, much like the dime library westerns of the late 19th century with their tow-parter extendo-titles:  Valerie of the Blazing Sands; or, Colonel Ingraham and the Satisfied Sod Buster, a Tale of Woe and Heroism and such.  

Odd Art Department: Art Brut in Advertising?

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There's not much in this illustration--the entire back page of an oversize pulbicity tourist pamphlet--to suggest any sort of professionalism, or training, or, well, ability.  But there it is, badly drawn, with unusual (if not bad) coloring, trying to entice people to visit this seaside resort in New Zealand. 

Maybe this is more “outsider art” than Art Brut.  Art Brut was a term used by Jean Dubuftet to describe raw/rough art produced by non-artists (and those mostly mental asylum residents¹).  Art critic Roger Cardinal coined “outsider art” as a English-language adaptation of the Dubuffet term², and has since come into use to describe unusual, technically naïve and unschooled Otherness of artworks.  This cover illustration is certainly bearing a pretty good-sized helping of otherness to it, from its pale, weird coloring to its basic inability to draw.  Somehow though it is attractive to me, and ultra-calming when it is not troubling.  It is just one of those peculiar works that is good and bad at the same time.

Notes:

1. A spectacular and early example of Art Brut is found in the phenomenally detailed, insightful-of-other-worlds work of  Adolf Wolfli.

2. "Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988).

History of Boredom: St. Joseph's Ennui in the Nativity?

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This woodcut, the work of the semi-anonymous "Italian Monogrammist" and printed around 1510, shows the newly arrived Christ in the arms of his mother, taking the airs outside the stable. What is unusual to me here is the attitude of St. Joseph, who adopts a dictionary-ready pose of nonchalance:  he is leaning against a tree, his left arm

 

propped up at the elbow on a tree limb, his feet crossed at the ankles, with a look of I-don't-know-what on his face.  He is definitely not of the standard Josephs that one sees in this scene.Perhaps he is communicating a certain type of tiredness, but I doubt it. The man is staring off into space, not looking at wife and baby, not looking at the many visitors coming through the tunnel in the mountain and excitedly rounding the nearby turn in the road, not looking at anything that we can see.  He's not seeing the invisible stuff either:  not the praying angels and not the sun-ray daggers.He's not tired, not excited about the baby and wife, not excited about the visitors, and in a pose of resident uncaring relaxation--boredom might be the easiest and best explanation, except, well, it doesn't make for a good story. 

Unusual Views, Continued: Looking Straight Down, Found-Dadaist, 1919

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The idea of representing a view straight down, of looking straight down from some height, is a relatively recent occurrence, this view being somewhat rare in the antiquarian world pre-balloon or pre-heavier-than-air flight.  The pre-human-flight reason for its scarcity is understandable, but even after the first Montgolfiers’¹ ascension in 1787, there’s another 120+ years of scarcity yet to come before these views would start to pop up in common (and uncommon) literature..  Now I’m not talking about cartography, which is basically a straight-down view of the world—what I’m referring to (and where I’ve posed a few time before in this blog, particularly here) is that same view but not as a map per se, but what you would see if you were dangling out of a plane or balloon.  The extraordinary map of Imola by Leonardo would certainly classify because of its you-are-there qualities:  essentially it would be like a bird’-eye or oblique view, but straight down.

I think that this view was avoided because (in pre-flight days) of the high imagination that it took to picture the view, and, secondly, because of how this view created its own special Flatland² and crunched, flattened, everything down to what becomes somewhat (and sometimes entirely) unrecognizable.  This point was just hammered home to me while trolling through an interesting book by Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg³. Biro makes a great find of unintended/found Dada illustration in the Berliner Illustriete Zeitung⁴ in which a photographer makes images of passing pedestrians, turning them into quite something else due to the squashed depth of field and non-perspective. The photos make the point perfectly of why artists might have avoided this straight-down perspective.  The Found Dadaist result is interesting in itself. 

[My apologies for so many hyphenated words in this post! Here’s some more in case the reader demands them: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -.]

Notes:

1. The two brothers launched 4 June 1783, just before the end of our Revolutionary War, rising up in a 37,000 cubic foot balloon of alum-coated taffeta.

2. Edwin Abbott’s fantastic and popular 1884 satire of English society, depicting the world of wants and desires in terms of a two-dimensional world structure (and desires for a three-dimensional existence).  Brilliant and simple; well, maybe not so simple.

3. The Dada Cyborg, Views of the New Human in Wiemar Berlin, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

4.  The issue for 29 December 1919.  This is the Berlin version of the weekly newspaper that I browse through, the Leipzig Illustriete Zeitung. 

History of Boredom: “Nothing” in the Window

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Looking at little things has its rewards, though what rewards those are may be a little oblique.  Today’s post is relegated to looking at the sidewalk on a stroll rather than the surroundings, and the sidewalk view is more like Baudelaire’s sidewalk botanist than Proust’s golden Parisian sidewalks. So it goes.

Petrus Ciacconius Toledanus (Pedro Chacon,1525-1581) was a scholar who wrote on many things; this book, De Triclinio sive De modo convivandiapud priscos Romanos…(printed in 1664, 63 years after the author’s death) , takes a wide and classically scholarly look at bathing practices…and that includes bathing in water or in wine, and bathing once or six times a day, with dinner in the water or not, what to wear bathside, and all sorts of other bathing entertainments and necessaries.

But that’s not why I’m making this short stop here—it’s the odd bit in this illustration that has my attention.  I’m also not sure about the activity in the print—I’m fixed on the little bit of shrubbery that we can see in the background windows.  Having looked at thousands and thousands of images like this, I must say that seeing natural nothingness like this outside a window is very unusual.  In the unknown, unused and non-existent art appreciation genre of “Boring Things Seen Through Windows”, this print would be standard fare.

But the real issue here for me is that the window is just a window in this print.  It doesn’t have any of the heavy significance associated with windows-in-art of the past, the window dripping with symbolic/spiritual significance (illumination, enlightenment, vision, godhead, divinity).  The window as a simple source of light or vehicle to relieve crowded interiors seems to be overwhelmed by the religious/needy windows at least through the first half of the 17^th century.  (At least that’s my sense of it—I haven’t a single figure to back anything up.) The little windows that creep into the work of Van Eyck--especially in the famous “The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna  Cenami” of 1434—are interesting examples of the window as a simple source of light. (In the “Marriage” painting the window is much more visible in the iconic reverse double-painting seen in the mirror on the wall in the background.) Same too for the windows in some Vermeers, where you can virtually feel the breeze coming through them and into the  occasionally stuffy rooms.  And also for Durer:  while his great study of St. Jerome has a presiding possibility of Pure Holy Light coming into his room, it might also just be sunlight; on the other hand there is little doubt that the windows in his famous depiction of an artist working a perspective study of a model through a dividing screen have nothing to do with the spiritual, and are just simple mundane windows.

  

By the 17^th century there is a new genre of paintings having people looking out of windows (as with the case of Gerrit Dou, where we observe what seems like every one of his subjects looking out through a window), which means I guess that the observer is the one who might shine in.  Enter the 20^th century and the window takes on new

meanings, as in bent/draped windows in Dali, or floating windows looking into the lonely world of Magritte, or the solitary nothing-but-a-window sculpture of Duchamp. 

The unintended nothingness of the 16^th century is what I think I like the best.

Notes:  For some pretty interesting books written on the window in art, see: Carlo Gottlieg, The Window in Art (University of Michigan, 1981, and which is a nice chronological treatment of the window, plus some psychological stuff) and Suzanne Delehenty, The Window in Twentieth-Century Art (1986), among others.  These will point the way.

A Short Note on Forks and Art

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I was on my way to something else when I stopped to look at this engraving by Ulrich Pinder, his last supper, the Speculum passionale, published in Nuremberg in 1507.  It has a nice perspective, an interesting ceiling, and a crowded table with very little on it in the way of food.  And no forks.  Knives—yes of course—and big containers of some sort of liquid, but no forks.  As it turns out, the fork really hadn’t made a strong appearance in northern Europe until the end of the century, brought back evidently from travelers in Europe.  The first appearance in a painting, in another Last Supper, I believe, occurs at least by 1599.

I know, there’s no spoons either, but they had been around for a long time, and just didn’t make an appearance on this table for reasons unknown.

"I observed a custome in all those Italian Cities and Townes through which I passed that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels, neither doe I think that any other nation of Christendome doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are cormorant in Italy, does alwaies at their meales, use a little fork when they cut the meate . . . their forkes being for the most part made of iron or steel, and some of silver, but these are used only by gentlemen. The reason of this their curiosity is because the Italian cannot endure by any means to have his dish touched by fingers, seeing that all men's fingers are not alike cleane. Hereupon I myself thought to imitate the Italian fashion by this forke cutting of meate, not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and often-times in England since I came home."Thomas Coryate, Coryat's Crudities (1611)
See:

Forbes, R. J. "Food and Drink," Charles Singer, et. al. eds. A History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Vol. II: The Mediterranean Civilization and the Middle Ages, c. 700 B.C. to c. A.D. 1500:  page 126.

Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, London: Collins, 1981:  page 209.

A Stone-Cold Masterpiece of Naive Art: Teresa Ottalo, ca. 1860

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As a collector of naive art--particularly produced with letters or numbers--and as a person generally interested in naive and outsider (and art brut and letterist and found )art, I was astonished to find this spectacular work by Terea Ottalo (ca. 1800-1870).  First of all, I make this to be about 200 lines long, and about 50 inches tall.  The words are, well, minute.

Secondly:  this magnificnet thing was EMBROIDERED.  Breathtaking, really.

I haven't yet found out anything about Ms. Ottalo, except some basic references of her affiliated "school" of art.

I do know that this, whatever it is, is a masterpiece. 

And an unfortunately smudgy detail, such as it is--I cannot offhandedly find a good, clear, high resolution image of anything at all by Ms. Ottalo.  This will have to do for now, but I think it gives a reasonable idea of the fineness of this work (found in Michek Thevoz's Art Brut, Skira, 1976)--this sample detail represents less than 10% of the overall image:                                                                                                                                        

Skeleton of the Sun and Sky: Henry Van de Velde pre-Abstract Art, 1884

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I wonder if Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) as one of the earliest people to paint what he saw as an x-ray of the stuff of existence.  His artwork, “Sun at Ocean (Rhythmic Synthesis”) which I found in  Werner Hoffman’s Turning Points in Twentieth century Art, 1890-1917 and which was executed in 1888/9, looks to me to be absolutely incredible

for its time, a nearly non-representational, proto-abstract something, done three decades before these genres came into being.

His representation of known objects seems to be nearly, completely, removed—what we have left here is the representation, or impression, of the subject of the painting.  We can see the sky and sun and ocean there still, but just barely: their representation in skeletal form shows us the bare bones of the world, like a pre-X-Ray X-Ray (which didn’t come around until the very ready and able Wilhelm Roentgen bumped into it in the winter of 1895).

It is hard to think of how unusual this artwork would’ve been, even given some historical consulting. The Impressionists, who had crept up into the artworld existence to their first show in 1874, were seen as being a radical, revolutionary, avant garde movement.  Their reception was not a cordial one, as they were threatening the established order of the instructionally-regulated world of art that had stood for centuries.  Van de Velde’s work was far outside of Impressionism, or at least it would seem so to me, making it more radical still.

I’m not sure where van de Velde’s work stands in the history of Modernism (ca. 1875-1916, when virtually very major discipline encountered massive change).  It doesn’t seem to be a prototype for abstract art, which doesn’t seem to have precedents in the 19th century outside of found-art in mathematics of the fourth dimension.  This new world of art seems to begin suddenly in 1907 with the work of Braque and Picasso, and then Marcel Duchamp, and Nayral (1910) and Gris (1911), followed by many others including Gleizes and Marcoussis and Metzinger and Villon (all in 1912).  The Impressionists on the other hand have a very rich history of impressionistic works leading up to their major debut in 1874:  like Courbet’s “Portrait of Baudelaire” (1848/50), or Cezanne’s “Man with a Blue Cap” (1865), or Bourdin’s “Cloud Study” (ca. 1859), on Monet’s “Still Life” (1859, with the disappearing bread), or Degas’ “Semiarmis…” (1861) or Pissarro’s “The Road” (1864), or the glorious modern self portrait of Cezanne done in 1865.  There are many others.

Van de Velde’s art leaves me puzzled, probably because I really don’t know about the painting phase of his life (an activity he gave up in 1892); probably because I just don’t know enough, and am not art scholar.  I don’t know why this isn’t significant, unless, of course, the work was not seen, or was unknown, or was simply rejected.

But that still leaves us with the artwork itself: a skeleton. Scaffolding.  Stage setting.  Fragments of the remaining object.  Simplification: a rediscovery of the material of the world reduced to its barest essentials, to a geometrical simplicity of nothing but lines, dashes, suggesting a larger form.  It is the amount of weight in the “suggestion” of form that makes this work so incredible—up to this time, I think, there weren’t any other works of art where so much was open to interpretation, and so much of the optical characteristics of the subject had been removed.  (Rodin’s statue of Balzac, showing the author seemingly ripping himself from his stone, was much hated when it was shown in 1897, the “unfinished” parts seen as ugly and crude by many.  This would seem a good example of the weight of suggested form in pre-20th century art.)

1889.  Decades before Malevich, Rodchenko, Balla, Severini, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Klee, Kandinsky.  (And Mondrian, the biggest question mark for me and greatest possible inheritor of this work.) I just don’t get it where van de Velde “went”.  He did go on to a terrific career in design and architecture  in worlds outside of this effort; I just don’t know what happened to “Sky and Sea'...maybe Henry just didn't like itpreferring his gorgeous nouveau design motifs.  After all, he survived this artwork by almost 70 years (!), and perhaps he laid it aside as a youthful flourish.  As I said, I really don't know.