Ptak Science Books

On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

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Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years.  Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes.  There are thousands and thousands of cases like these.  Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels.  Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”. 

 

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next.  People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived.  I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes.  He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s.  His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”². 

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

 

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.

Pre-Histories of Famous Things: Art Nouveau

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This may well be the very first book illustrated in the style known as Art Nouveau--Arthur Mackmurdo’s Wren’s City Churches—coming a dozen years before the revolutionary Gismonda poster of Alphonse Mucha. The 1895 poster by Mucha caused an enormous stir, so much so that this style, which would be known shortly thereafter as Art Nouveau, was initially known as Style Mucha.  But that didn’t stick; Art Nouveau and Jugendstil did. 

 

Where does this leave the 1883 breakthrough design by multi-talented designer-architect arts-and-crafts-inspired Mackmurdo?  His design for the Wren certainly has the pathology of Nouveau and stands far apart from the very sedimented regulatory aspects of the Grande Ecole schools of the day:  flowing, organic, deeply stylized, intuitively suggestive.  Mackmurdo’s title page is lovely, curvilinear and simple:  its main base are three flowers with 21 leaves, bounded by two birds (chickens, perhaps but certainly not wrens), and fills the requirements of the new style.  Except there wasn’t a new style yet, not for years to come; Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was out there well ahead of the curve, and seems to have been out there all by himself. 

Prehistoric Surrealism, Part 6: Mueller's Anatomy, 1845

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This image occurs in Johannes Mueller’s Manuel de Physiologie (translated from the German editions of 1838-1840, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen) and—removed from context—looks to me as though it could belong in a Surrealist Salon in 1915 as part of a revolutionary new artistic movement.  The print is part of a revolutionary work, though, back in its original context.  Mueller (1801-1858) was responsible for introducing the sciences of comparative chemistry, psychology and physics into the field of comparative physiology.  Mueller’s textbook was extremely important and was translated rather quickly into many languages. 

 

Notes:

A wiki article on Mueller (who was chair of anatomy and physiology at Humboldt University of Berlin, or Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1833-1858) points out that he was teacher and mentor to a number of fabulous scientists: ” Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Theodor Schwann, Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle, Carl Ludwig and Ernst Haeckel.”

Pre-Histories of Famous Things: the Cat in the Hat

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I’ve written here earlier on the 236 different words used to create The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words That Changed reading Forever), a book which I found to be a major accomplishment, a very difficult undertaking with superb outcome.

 

That is why I was struck seeing the cover of volume 1 of this rare two-volume set illustrated by the not-yet-famous Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991, and son and grandson of brewmasters).  There is no question in my mind that the small head on the large-bodied serpent is that of The Cat in the Hat (TCITH, which sounds like an Egyptian deity). 

 

TCITH might very well make its first forensic appearance here.  Seuss busily illustrated these two slim pamphlets for Esso Oil and Grease—they presented the rules of the water, and Seuss responded with funny inset illustrations and delightful chapter-ending slugs.  He also provided a number of Seussian/Rube-Goldbergian machines which mechanically overcomplicated (or “too-complexified” in Bushisms, (true)), which are both complex and simple, delightful.  

 

Time's Bad Hair Day: 1540

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 This image proves that even Time itself can have a bad hair day, from time to time.  The woodcut image appears as the printer's mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which was printed in Paris in 1540. 

 

Time isn’t very pretty here, and is made to seem a little Satanic, what with cloven hooves and the legs of some animal, strong torso and swift wings—the hair hiding the eye(s) completes a picture of damnable doom, and of whatever end we’re coming to.  Except for the righteous, though not quite: the word balloon describing Time’s spoken admonition is “Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus”, which means “only good deeds dulls the blade”.  That doesn’t necessarily mean “stops” the blade, which is bothersome.  I think that if someone were coming for me I'd like the blade as sharp as could be...

The Illustrated London News *WAS* Deliberately Funny (in 1908)

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I have more-or-less browsed the Illustrated London News for the 1890-1945 period now, and I can safely say that it was usually very interesting, almost always well written, beautifully illustrated, and almost never funny. I've mined many things from it over the years, and have posted dozens of things to this blog on the bits and pieces of interesting material present in--literally--every issue.  (It has endless info and unusual pictures on early aviation, fantastic coverage of WWI, and aspects too nunerous to mention.)  Again, humor was not a consideration or intended, even when it was--it was usually so stiff-lipped that you couldn't move your mouth for fear of breaking it off.

And then I stumbled upon the page 134 of the June 25th, 1908 issue which has FIVE funny things on it!  At least I think so--the funny shines like an avant garde nova.

For example:

 

 

History of Blank & Empty Things #22: God in a Hole in the Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 858  Blog Bookstore

I think that I'll start a thread on The History of Holes--which this post would secure nicely--though it will have to be differentiated from The History of Dots and The History of Blank and Empty Things somehow.  Still, I like the idea.

These title page illustrations may or may not reveal a hole in the sky, a glimpse into a blank heaven.  God knows that Heaven awaits its geology from Charles Lyell or cartography from Jed Hotchkiss, so this iconography that I’m creating for these two Renaissance views of the blank canvas of the universe may well be incomplete or completely wrong—but it is intriguing that there isn’t even a suggestion of what God’s environment might be.  This assumption that one might possibly be shown the celestial surroundings may also be enormously presumptive and unknowable/unseeable by human eyes, but since we are being shown a corporeal form of the Creator I thought that the  logic was also there to portray the Creator’s milieu, but it is not to be.  

The first title page is for the narrative poem Le Metamorfosi, Ovid’s  Metamorphoses, translated into Italian by Gioseppe Horologgi, and published in Venice in 1563.  It is certainly appropriate that God appears on the title page of this work, as Ovid tells the story of creation of all things and the history of man in the book’s 15¹ chapters—appropriate more so as this was one of the most popular intellectual biblio-tools of philosophers and writers right through the Middle Ages (having wide effect on Chaucer and Shakespeare on down).

The image seems to catch the Creator in the act between the fourth and fifth days, floating in a cloud-framed hole in the sky.  Beyond the hole there is a white emptiness—which makes me think that there is something; if there was nothing, I guess we’d have the absence of all color, or blackness.  Or perhaps not.  In any event I find the opening in the fabric of creation and its blankness/emptiness somehow restful. 

The second image is a little more open to debate as to whether that is God in the cloud, reading, or not; I prefer to believe it so.  The image is the colophon for Johann Virdung’s² (ca. 1465-1535, of Hassfurt0 Nova medicinae methodus…³, an astrological-medical book written by a celebrated astrologer, professor and correspondent of Joahnnes Trithemius.

If this is to be the Creator in the clouds, reading a book, then I would take the white blankness behind him to be another opening in the sky.   The small interesting bit about the title page is that it spells out the year and the month and the day on which the book was printed, which was not very common at all, not a bit.

I’ve certainly noticed white/blank/empty skies in prints, but I’m not so sure that the celestial hole has registered with me before today.  It has the potential for an interesting idea, in the opposite-of-a-black-hole category. Maybe. 

Notes:

1. The contents of the work, as follows:  Book I: Cosmogony, Ages of Man, Gigantes, Daphne, Io;; Book II: Phaëton, Callisto, Jupiter and Europa;;Book III: Cadmus, Actaeon, Echo and Pentheus;; Book IV: Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda.;Book V: Phineas, the Rape of Proserpina;Book VI: Arachne, Niobe, Philomela and Procne; Book VII: Medea, Cephalus and Procris; Book VIII: Nisos and Scylla, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon; Book IX: Heracles, Byblis; Book X: Eurydice, Hyacinth, Pygmalion, Adonis, Atalanta, Cyparissus; Book XI: Orpheus, Midas, Alcyone and Ceyx; Book XII: Iphigeneia, Centaurs, Achilles; Aesacus; Book XIII: the Sack of Troy, Aeneas; Book XIV: Scylla, Aeneas, Romulus; Book XV: Pythagoras, Hippolytus, Aesculapius, Caesar.

2. Lynn Thorndike:  Johann Virdung of Hassfurt again Isis 25, 1936, p. 363; Faust and Johann Virdung of Hassfurt, Isis 26, 1936/37, p. 321

3.  Full title: Nova medicinae methodus, nunc primum & condita & aedita, ex mathematica ratione morbos curandi.  Available here!

Other Virdung and astrology titles located at this marvelous site, here.   

 

Found Dadaist Art--Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650 & 1807

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I’ve written a few times in this blog (here, here and here) about what I think is found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art and would like today to continue that thread with the following two unusual pieces of art.

The first is a detail from the title page of Joseph de Casanova’s Primera parte del arte de escrivir todas formas de letras (1650). This is not the Casanova (Giacamo, 1725-1798) who most people would initially think of—the seductive womanizer of the 18^th century—but another, earlier, Spanish Casanova (1613-1692) who was important in the history of round hand script and the lettera bastarda.  Joseph Casanova ‘s evolutionary handwriting style was considerably lighter and easier than most styles, and his influence in changing handwriting practices was substantial.  What is interesting for me is the detail at the bottom of the engraved title page for his book, the emblem containing  “Labore et Constantia”.  Labor and consistency, decorated with a hand and compass, ever watching and listening with ears and eyes above and below.

[This design comes from (at least) one earlier source—the printer’s device for Christoph Plantijn (Antwerp, 1583), though without the eyes (below).] I like the floating aspect of the disembodied body parts, floating in their little sea of constancy, ruled by a compass. 

 The second image has another set of disembodied eyes/ears (among other things) and has all the flavor of the dada/surrealist flourishes of the frammenti of Piranesi. This comes from Bernhard von Montfaucon’s Greichische, Romische und andere Alterthuemer… (Nurenberg, 1807). When taken out of context, as a disembodied image, the von Montfaucon certainly has a dadaist taste for me, especially if you edit the image a little.

 

Foot of God, Pt 2: Continuing Thread on Odd Things in the Sky

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I am going to indecently add to my “foot of god” series with this metal engraving from the accomplished Joachim Camerarius¹’ Symbolorum et Emblematum…(published in four volumes at Nuremberg from 1590 to 1605).  There is so much to offer from these books, I freely admit, but I’m afraid that I’m stopped at this foot-from-the-sky image. 

The engravings, executed by Hans Sibmacher, were among the first executed in metal, and the book itself was the first of its kind to present botanical emblems. (The other three volumes contained emblems for animals of land-sea-air.) They are splendid and concise, and filled with soft detail.  And still I’m left with the foot. 

The legend is mostly a mystery and doesn’t help me with the foot—it says something about beauty and growth and madness and reward—and the saffron crocus.    This plant has been a commodity for thousands of years, used for therapeutics and dyeing and spice.  It takes quite a lot of these plants to produce a gram of powder—about 150. 60,000 plants are necessary to produce a pound of saffron, which is getting to be quite pricey.  Given this, saffron was very often imitated and counterfeited—a crime taken quite seriously in many places, and perhaps none more so in Bavaria where (in 1444) a conviction meant death.

And as long as we’re talking about odd antiquarian images the sky, I’d like to point out the work by the Jesuit Franciscus Nerrincq (1638-1712), De goddelycke voorsienigheydt², in which there are several odd eyes that burn their way through the atmosphere.   Eyes/eye of the creator occur frequently in religious presentations and emblems, but not so very often as hands holding a pair of eyes.  I know all of this is very heavy stuff in the history of Christian iconography and the progression of emblemata, but I’d rather deal with the images out of context here and have them stand on their own without interpretation. 

NOTES

1.From the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th edition, volume 5:  JOACHIM CAMERARIUS (1534-1598), German botanist and physician, son of the classical scholar of the same name, was born at Nuremberg on the 6th of November 1534. After finishing his studies in Germany he visited Italy, where he graduated as doctor of medicine. On his return he was invited to reside at the courts of several princes, but preferred to settle in his native town of Nuremberg, where he had a botanical garden and formed extensive collections. He wrote a Hortus Medicus (1588) and several other works. He died at Nuremberg on the i 1th of October 1598.

 2.  De goddelycke voorsienigheydt uytgebeeldt in Joseph onder-coninck van Egypten : verciert met sinne-beelden ende sede-leeringen.  The entire book can be seen here.

The University of Utrecht emblem collection is extensive and easy to navigate—there is drop-down box for available titles, and once selected, the book comes up with biblio info on the right and a drop-down of thumbnails for the entire book at left.  It is a joy to navigate. 

Emerging Patterns and Hidden Visible Art

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Even when I know that this picture is coming, when it is rounding the bend, I still can’t see it for the portrait it is supposed to be.  The lithograph is by Berthold Loeffler (1874-1960), a prolific Viennese designer, artist and professor at Kunstgewerbeschule (1907-1935) whose prodigious commercial

output covered about every other letter of the artistic alphabet.  This work is a portrait of his mostly-forgotten fellow-Viennese writer, Peter Altenberg¹ for the Kabaerett Fledermaus of 1909.  The portrait is all squares and one big button to me, and I have to consciously look for the rest of the picture in spite of knowing that the stuff is there. 

It is an unusual picture of emergent art—for me not quite like, for example, the cover of the pamphlet Cinema by J. Epstein, where the letters are a jumble for just a moment and then snap into view.  The Loeffler portrait is much more densely hidden in a much more straightforward manner, and fools my mind every time. 

 Notes

1.Altenberg is probably a product of his time, or a time of his product.  Described as the bohemian’s bohemian, he lived an outre lifestyle in little cafes and bars, wearing capes and broad-brimmed hats, and was evidently something of an effeminate womanizer with a very deep interest in very young girls.  There you go.  Altenberg stood quite high in that world, as Alban Berg put some of his postcard-poetry to music in his Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg, which caused a near-riot in its premier, abruptly stopping the performance which would not see the light of day again for another 40 years.