JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
There was some immediate shock of recognition1 in seeing this image, not for its exact earlier-appearing twin, but in the sense of the spherical delivery of something. In this case, it is a Victorian woman and the depiction of her movements in exercise–but what I remember and associate with this is the Sienese Giovanni di Paolo, and his depiction of the monumentalist giveth-and-taketh cycle of the creation of Eden and the epic fall of humanity and its expulsion from it. Di Paolo put a lot of history into that one image, the perfection of Paradise and the disposal of Adam and Eve, all via the intercession of the creator of the universe, with is hands of the sphere of being. (Talk about building a wall….).
The image of the exercising woman is found in a delightful book used in the banner of Chloe Roberts (@chloerabbits ) a web producer for the Wellcome Library (http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/) collection and which is available in full in a very nice copy at Internet Archive, here: The portable gymnasium : a manual of exercises, arranged for self instruction in the use of the portable gymnasium, by Gustav Ernst, London 1861: https://archive.org/details/b20399789 Image source for the di Paolo: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_di_Paolo#/media/File:Creation-and-the-expulsion-from-the-paradise-11291.jpg
Notes
1. And with that phrase comes other immediate recognitions, mainly in book form: William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, and Edmund Wilson The Shock of Recognition; both are excellent, and the Gaddis may well be a contender for Great American Novel.