JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 356

And so here we have a gorgeous title page for the very first treatise on automata, and the thing I’m focusing on are the stairs in the bottom corners of the design, the stairs that go nowhere.  Maybe its just because of the seemingly flat effect of the perspective that they became so obvious to me, or the  subtle sense of a twisted two-and-a-half dimensions feel to it, the very Escher-y feel of complex, impossible and improbable dimensionality.  For example, the very pre-Baroque ornamentation of this very heavy title page construction seem to bounce between convex and concave, like the background and foreground change place somehow, as it the case of Escher’s trying to find a place between planes of two- and three-dimensional representation.  Although here I’m pretty sure the effect is unintentional; whereas in Escher, the effect is the aim of the art. 

The design and the printing of this large book was the work of the firm of Bernardino Baldi, of Venice, who published De gli avtomati oueri machine se moventi...in Venice in 1589, the original by Her/Heron of Alexandria, who lived ca. 10-70 ACE.   Hero was one of the most exalted of Greeks in the pantheon of ancient experimenters and scientists, an unparalleled inventor and producer of the earliest automatic and robotic devices. Have a look at  the illustrated link to Hero’s fabulous work called Penumatics (below).