JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There’s a track on this blog located in the feebly-named category “Looking Closely/Deeply at Prints” were tiny bits and pieces of engraved artwork are exhumed for closer story, like passing a paper microscope over the image to draw out the semi-invisible and show the secret life of prints.  Often what this entails is some very curious work by the artist and/or the engraver as they sought to spice up a rudimentary architectural assessment of Salisbury Cathedral, or the town hall in Munich, or some sort of ruin in Surrey, or a street scene along old Broadway in NYC–and they would do this sometimes by including something artful and small, and completely unnecessary to the primary image on which they were working.

See this post for a good example (with other links) of this.

So, instead of having a few people in the street outside of Cathedral X to show the building to some sort of scale, the artist/engraver might include in their very tiny detail images of children fighting, or a legless beggar, or a pocket-thief, or a tripping aristocrat.  Or a man rounding a corner with a baby coffin on his shoulder. 

What happens here then is an intended-unintentional, sort of like an 18th century snapshot of Something that captures stuff of the daily grind in the process–and as it happens it is this stuff, the activities and the people doing the mundane chores of the 18th century that turn out to be the very interesting bits of the artwork.  After all, it was this sort of invisible activity that would tend not to be preserved in artwork or other visual documentation–but here it is, locked away in an architectural appreciation of some building Y in some city Z.  And we are lucky for the contrivances of those long-asleep artisans.

But the Zoomology posts are something a little different than this–they simply are a deep observation of an interesting detail in an antiquarian print or photograph that shows an artwork in and of itself, a sort of descending fractal of appreciation.  And simple.

The first sample in this quick-posting category is the sea anemone, or Zoophyte (old school classification), that we see in this series of images (above and below) from the great and prolific Abraham Rees (who must have had a team Rees, a group of scholars like the Bourbaki who worked together mostly anonymously save for the (in this case real) man whose name is given credit for the entire work) and engraved in 1813.  The image in question is a flustra bombycina, a Verme (according to the obsolete Linnaen taxonomy), and it just called out for deeper inspection:

And the zoom-out to the full image:

JF Ptak Science Books       Post 1668  

Part of Paper Microscope and  Zoomology  series.

[Detail from the image immediately below, the small scene immediately in the foreground.]

Images hold selective secrets for different people of divergent interests.  Sitting through a motion picture, for example, shows a series of still images flashed before us—in a single scene people bring to bear their own ways of experience and observation.  A forensic pathologist will see things shown within their specialty different from someone with a chemical explosives background who will see a bomb differently from an ER doc who would respond to an emergency room differently from a bookseller who might notice in the scene that the paperback edition of a Tree Grows in Brooklyn being read by an American G.I. in 1944 didn’t exist yet, and so on.  A single image can hold a tremendous variety of depth and interpretation depending on the observers’ perspective. 

Most of the time when I look at prints now I am looking at the extraneous “stuff” that is used as filler to the print’s purpose. I’ve written about this a few times earlier in this blog under the (bad) general title of Prints—Looking HARD at…), and I find the uncommitted art just fascinating, sort of like “loose”, unnecessary snapshots of common life, everyday life, of people walking by. 

The two prints today that I stumbled upon have a particular interest—they depict semi-hidden children in the foreground-filling detritus of the architectural marvel that is the subject of the artwork.  Children really don’t appear too terribly often in art from 1500-1850, so it is especially interesting to look really hard at these prints and pick out the kids and what they were doing.

Of course this begs the question of “why?”—why would the artist bother with such detail in the foreground, let alone bring children into the picture?

The first image is the gorgeous Cambridgeshire Medieval cathedral at Ely.  This is an engraving showing the north west view of the cathedral, and it is of course grand and imposing.  The curious foreground shows a somewhat dilapidated-looking cemetery, and looking further still we see two men digging a grave, and to the right of them, a small child, seemingly pointing and reading a gravestone.  What an unusual detail this is, what with it occupying less than 1% of the area of the image in general.

The second image (above) shows the façade of the Town Hall at Cologne.  Of the twenty or so people in the street in front of the building, four are children (there’s also a pair of fighting/playing dogs).  One of the miniatures scenes seems to show a boy in a “pick me up” pose.  To the right of this is another, odder, scene, showing a woman—possibly a street food peddler—with her two boys(?), the children kneeling in front of a gentleman who is in turn leaning against a pillar of the Town Hall.  What the boys are doing is a mystery, as is the intention of the artist in including them.
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Unfortunately these “microscope” studies reveal only the basic forms of the semi-hidden, and really don’t ever seem to offer us a reason as to why they were preserved.  Presently I’m happy enough to just recognize them and appreciate their small saved existence.