A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
These images—American baseball cards from the 1950’s and early 1960’s—seem to come from an removed, unknown source, at least to me.The odd thing is that I have a recollection for some of these designs, seen in my tender years, and seeing them now is an odd assault on my memory.I do remember the dark reds and the severe cut-outs, but now they look so unusual, so unnatural, bizarre, as though the artist who rendered the design had never seen baseball players—or men—before.They might as well have been aliens pouring themselves from their space ship (why do those spaceships have landing lights?), or Americans disembarking from their tall ships in Yokohama harbor in 1859.
I must point out that these images come from what I think may be a fantastic baseball book: Brendan Boyd & Fred Harris The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book (1973). It is solidly funny, witty, and insightful, and the book covers things far beyond baseball cards, even in its remarkable and scant 150 pages. Oh, and they know their baseball cold cold cold, and they know it far and away beyond just the numbers.
The only weird thing about Mr. Gino Cimoli (1923-2011) was his baseball card when he was with the Dodgers. He was actually the first California-born hitter to play for the newish Dodger California club, and was a decent fielder and batter though not often gifted, and managed to be the fourth outfielder in difficult-to-break outfields, like the 1960 Pirates (having Bob Skinner, Bill Virdon and Roberto Clemente) and the 1961 Milwaukee Braves (where he found himself behind two other good players and Hank Aaron). He did play an important role in filling up the holes in the 1960 club, and conbtributed to their pennant, but found himself traded the next year, anyway. He was with his third team in three years in 1962 when he managed 15 triples (!) for the KC Athletics, following with 11 triples the next year--a pretty good feat, epecially when you're 6'2 and 200+ pounds.
But his basebal card is onbe of the oddest bits I've ever seen.
Little or nothing needs to be said about Mr. John Sain or that day of rain. I've included this card because of the bizarro choice of graphic backdrop, which means nothing.
Lastly, I could not help but publish this card for Billy Loes in large format. I have no idea what anyone--the designer, the photographer, or Billy--was thinking when his card was put together. In the annals of Surreal Baseball Art, Billy Loes' card is a post-anticipatory (?) early Kandinsky.
I should also point out that Billy Loes was a good pitcher: he had four very good years for Brooklyn 1952-1955, but things went badly for him in 1956. He managed to stay on for another five seasons, which means that folks thought he might come back. He didn't.
Following hundreds of years of intrigue and shadowy majesty, of imagined life and legend, the Japanese finally allowed its transformation to take place, opening itself to trade and other permissibles with the rest of the world.It was the beginning of massive cultural, industrial and scientific cross-fertilization, ending centuries of isolation and self-sustained empire--and which basically took six years to occur.The change started with the efforts of the U.S. government and its liaison in Commodore Matthew Perry, establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Japan via Perry’s expedition there in 1853. By 1859* the transformation was very well underway, with Yokohama—as one of the major trading ports in Japan—being what former US
Ambassador to Japan William Leonhart called "the microcosm of Japanese modernization”, and the port opened for trader with the foreigners.Japanese artists responded to this influx of exceptionally different people with the Yokohama-e school of woodblock illustration—these artists were primarily from the Utagawa school, and worked illustrating the controlled invasion of their country for three decades, producing some 800 prints.
I like the idea of microcosms. Actually I like the detail within microcosms—sometimes, admittedly, the microcosms just don’t work, though their elements sometimes do.
The Yokohama-e school of Japanese illustration was the pollination zone for the distribution of Japanese interpretations of these new cultures coming to their country.They are a beautiful mix of the old (the very old) and the forces that were rubbing up against that antiquity, the old reacting to something brand new, images never seen before.
And in all of this beauty of newness, and all of the observations of never-before-seen rituals, and uniforms, and ships, and people, the thing that I have latched onto like a bad cold from a kindergartener is the American flag—and actually, the field of blue and the stars of the American flag.For some reason the blue field is almost, always, tiny; and I’ve no idea why.But I just love it—the flag looks big and billowy and alive, and it has that tiny blue space.
*1859 was a very big year in the history of science:it saw the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and also the creation of Bunsen and Kirchhoff’s spectrum analysis.A monumental year for the development of insight and vision.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1830 Part of the series on the History of Holes. (Apologies for no-para spacing--Typepad is buggy again.)
A beautiful and inventive way of addressing issues of perspective and un-reality in the centuries before the introduction of electricity was more able to suspend belief in the existing/obvious was via the catopticum1. This object (an example of which is pictured below, taken from the oddball/genius/problematic polymath Athanasius Kircher in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae...2 printed in 1676), and the name of which is taken from the Greek katoptron, mirror) was an advanced parlor toy and artwork, a sort-of primitive free-standing theatre of multiplied objects, a box that contained things that were seemingly larger than their container.
This image makes the "image engine" a little clearer:
Source: Tratado da Catoptrica, (manuscript, 1716); from the Biblioteca Nacional Digital, here.
It's a romance of images machine, a box of antique wonder, a peepshow of centuries before, putting more things into a space than could exist. It was a relatively simple machine of great ingenuity: the interior of the free-standing box with rows of holes along its top edge perpendicular to the ground, and was lined with mirrors (as shown above in the Spanish document), with some mirrors set of at 45% angles; when objects were placed within the imaging-area of the angled mirrors, the object was multiplied, and then multiplied over and over as a result of the surrounding mirrors, creating in effect a "hall of mirrors", leaving the observer with a sense impression of many dozens of objects that were contained within a container that was impossibly too small for what was being seen.
This of course is a property of some holes--they tend to make things larger than they could previously possibly "be".
In this case, the viewer would look through a hole into a Borgesian box which would contain a multitude of its possible interiors. Looking through a hole in the end of a glass and mirror-ended tube and pointing it at the sky at night would reveal an enormous multiplication of a small part of that sky. In the early case of Galileo, what was first seen with the telescope was the multiplication of what was believed to be a finite and god-granted sky of perfection--he was seeing into some other sky, into a new vault of heaven, something never before seen, above-and-beyond what was known to exist. Hooke and Louwenhoeck had a similar experience with their (second generation) microscopes, seeing details and life never before encountered, entire worlds in a place no bigger than the head of a pin.
Sometimes a hole is just a dark thing; but more often than not, it isn't.
Notes:
1. From the Greek, katoptron, mirror or pertaining to a reflected image or reflected light, such as from a mirror. There is another sort of catoptric that has been sort of widely used in antiquarian painting and parlor entertainments, which involves a canonical mirror reflecting a wide-field and distorted image into its proper perspective, which is known as catoptric anamorphosis. Another version of this sort of optic imaging is optical anamorphosis, which requires the viewer to stand at a particular (usually sharp) angle to a painting containing a semi-hidden image whose proper perspective is revealed only at a particular angle of viewing.
An example of catoptric anamorphosis, from the Kircher mentioned above:
See here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/catoptric.html
2. Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae In X. Libros digesta. Quibus Admirandae Lucis & Umbrae in mundo, atque adeo universa natura, vires effectusque uti nova, ita varia novorum reconditiorumque speciminum exhibitione, ad varios mortalium usus, panduntur. Editio altera priori multo auctior. The work is presented at Bibliodyssey, here.
Mr. P.K.hauls out a great quote and summarization of the work of Kircher by Robert Moray in his letter to the great guiding post of the Royal Society, Henry Cavendish, which really captures the spirit of the very busy/very curious and curious old man:
"Whatsoever Mr. Huygens & others say of Kircher, I assure you I am one of those that think the Commonwealth of learning is much beholding to him, though there wants not chaff in his heap of stuff composted in his severall peaces, yet there is wheat to be found almost every where in them. And though he doth not handle most things fully, nor accurately, yet yt furnishes matter to others to do it. I reckon him as usefull Quarries in philosophy and good literature. Curious workmen may finish what hee but blocks and rough hewes. Hee meddles with too many things to do any exquisitely, yet in some that I can name I know none goes beyond him, at least as to grasping of variety: and even that is not onely often pleasure but usefull." (My bold.) [Sir Robert Moray in a letter to Henry Oldenburg, 1665]
For many centuries people have been trying to control the future, seeing into future’s past, using tea leaves, foreheads, palm prints, brain bumps, nose angles, the position of the stars, rolled animal bones and printed interpretations of the creator of the universe.Some of these have faded into embarrassed obscurity, but only some; some methods are present today, stronger than ever.
The rolled bones part of this makes the prettiest pictures, I think: for example, this image from Paul Pambst1 (published in 1546) shows some of the dice combinations and what they would correspond to in the revolving paper disks and columns of interpretations in the body of the book, a simple throwing of shaped animal residue somehow laying claim to predictive power.Not that it is much different from any of the other divination methods.
One such method that had been in strong and continued use for thousands of years and is now mostly relegated to dust is the heated up and swirling inspection of urine.It was thought for millenia that pee held secrets to what was going on inside the body, and that was mostly true, except that given the state of medical knowledge the only thing that the practioner could do with the sample was hold it up to the light and make good solid guesses on how color/consistency corresponded to the patient.A reddish tint (as we see here in this painting by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675, and who made an appearance in yesterday’s post) might suggest that the (female) subject was suffering from morbens virginus (uterine hysteria, “a signifying of too much concoction in the body”), which, when the imaginary disease/unease was diagnosed would’ve led to lead consumption and a good bleeding.
Moving slightly up the alpha from Pambst is Udalr Pinder, whose Epiphanie Medicorum…2 (published in Nurnberg in 1506) is a state-of-the-art disposition on urine inspection, complete with this pee color wheel.This idea is as interesting as it is entertaining, because at its base is a scientific aspect of trying to establish a common (color) base for discussion of specimens. The color descriptions (taken in translation fromKirsten Jungersen’s (MA, classical philologist, visiting scholar, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) “The relation between text and colours in medieval urine wheels” (here) are poetic, lyrical. They are also a small insight into common things of the 15th century, the author selecting colors from things that were ubiquitous and known to everyone, and so in this way could be used as a basis for the common understanding of a given color.
And so here are the glorious colors (complete in “extended reading” below with the Latin above), most of which I’ve never heard as descriptors…and would love to see as an adopted sub-there by Crayola (“Crayola Urine Wheel Colors”):
“Bluish-grey as camel skin; White as wellwater; Light blue/green/grey as lucid horn; Milky as whey of milk; Slightly pale as a not reduced juice of Meat; Pale yellow as of a not reduced lemon; Wine-red as of animal liver; Black as very dark horn; Ruddy as pure intense gold; Green as green cabbage.”And of course:
“Slightly red as a lowered flame of fire”
and
“Red as a flame of fire not lowered”
They’re lovely!
But of course none of this was actually going to help anyone very much, especially when you moved from uroscopy into urinomancy (not a word one gets to use very often), where instead of trying to diagnose dis-ease the urinomancer would try to diagnose the future.Often heat was applied to the jar (matula) of urine, which would do, well, I don’t know what.It certainly looks dramatic, and makes for some excellent opportunities for artists to discern candle-lit color and wonderful reflections (as in Dou).Actually, it was in this way that the golden color of urine was determined (poor alchemists!) not to come from gold at all—urine was finally boiled away until its component urea was discovered (in 1773)3.So heat did have a real and important function, but it took hundreds of years to get there properly.
And so it goes that predicting the future with urine was swept into histories dark places, though somehow bone throwers and astrologers managed to escape this fate.
Notes: 1. Paul Pambst. Loozbuch zu ehren der Roemischen…published in Strassburg in 1546.The Robert Sabuda website for popup books ahs a very good short essay on this book, here.
This delightful semi-progression of existence was found in Charles de Bouelles' beautifully titled Que hoc volumine continuentur; Liber de intellectu; Liber de sensu; Liber de Nichilo; Ars oppositorum; Liber de generatione; Liber de sapiente; Liber de duodecim numeris; Epistole complures, and printed in 1510 in Paris. It is, in a way, in a light way, truly a representation of a literal progress of the state of things, perhaps from an Aristotlean point-of-view.
I've no real expertise in this matter whatsoever, and I don't know the de Bouelles book, but I can do a bit of interpretation of the woodcut, which displays different stages of the existence of all manner of things--of all things.
It starts at left with a rock, with an inanimate object ("Minerale", and then "Petra":, with the overall statement of its being, "est"--that it, it "exists". This is the common basis to all eight stages of progress: "est" all the way across, and all the way down.
Next are the plants, the "vegetables"and "arbor", which live ("vivit"); followed at close heal by animals, "equus", which have"sensibilite", or senses. and sense, "sentit", which is a shared ability of four of the eight stages.
The shared height of progress comes next, in man, of "rationale", who is capable of thought ("intelligit"); these factors are shared by the scholar ("studiosis", who comes next, "virtus"). It is next that we start our descent, back to the simple existence of things, to the "est": the sensate, living, existing luxuriant, observing himself in a mirror, determined to see all that was possible to see. "Luxuria" follows, a man eating, enjoying nothing but the pleasure of consumption, simply "living"/Vivit". And then, lastly, to "acedia", to the indolent man, sitting, performing no task, doing nothing: existing, "est". Up and down, back to the rock.
This curious woodcut is found in Lorenz Heister's (1683-1758) Chirurgie, in welcher alles, was zur Wundarzney gehöret, nach der neuesten und besten Art, gründlich abgehandelt, und in 38 Kupfertaf, die neuerfundene und dienlichste Instrumente, nebst den bequemsten Handgriffen der chirurgischen Operationen und Bandagen deutlich vorgestellet werden. Hesiter was a Nuremberger anatomist and botanist, but most importantly here one of Germany's leading surgeons--and as a matter of fact was the founder of scientific surgery in Germany as well. He studied at Giessen and then at Leyden, where he was taught by great lights such as Ruysch, Bidloo, Albinus and Boerhaave. His Chirurgie was first published in 1718 in German, and was soon reprinted many times, and then translated into Dutch, English Italian, Spanish, Latin and French.
The thing that gave me pause in the realm of pausible things, the thing that is probably the least likely to be considered "academic", was the issue of the expression on the faces of the people undergoing amputation in the illustrations of the book. In the pre-general anaesthesia days of Hester, the man (above in detail and below) is remarkably composed, as is the person undergoing the arm amputation. It is all quite neat, orderly, non-chaotic and clean. And seemingly painless.
The word "anaesthesia" didn't even exist until 1846 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr), when William T.G. Morton made the first successful use of it in the fabulously-named Ether Dome of Massachusetts General Hospital. I guess the doctors could've dumbed these patients up with opium or other narcotics--but the sponge that was soaked in the stuff and inhaled under the nose is not in evidence. Of course, they might've ingested the narcotic, or smoked it, or had it applied, but I can't find any evidence of this in a quick look through the text. The patients also could've been given diethyl ether (the general form of which is perhaps a Lullian invention of the 13th century, though the "aether" part of it came apart three decades before the Hester book with Frobenius), but again, I'm not sure. Certainly they were given something and not riding out the operation on their own...we just don't know that from the book, which no doubt took the high-and-unscary-road to the issue of the cutting end of the amputation.
Hell is empty and the devils are all here--The Tempest [Dedicated to Rohan Myers for causing me to think about this...] See also "The Dot and the Sphere--Picturing Multiple Dimensions", here.
Listening last night to a reading of The Tempest I was very soundly struck by this famous line--it made me think not so much of hell-on-Earth and all of the other permutations in this vein, but of difficult/devilish questions. And what came out while I was listening to the play was this, something that seems difficult to me:
Can life as we know it exist in fewer than three dimensions?
I've never really thought about this before, even after having written a fair amount about the impact of the thinking on the Fourth Dimension in the arts and sciences as well as the history of the rediscovery of perspective in general. So while thinking about life and living and travel and so on in higher-than-the-third-dimension, it had never really come to me about thinking if it was possible for life to exist in less-than-three-dimensions.
It seems prima facie impossible, but why? The first thing that came into my mind was that in order for there to be a functioning brain--assuming that there could be a brain, somehow, in the second dimension--there must be a way for the brain to connect with itself. I do not think that the universe of axons and such could do their job if they had to intersect one one another rather than going above/below/around each other. All other things being equal, this would be a conversation killer, I think.
Perhaps it is as difficult to imagine this as it was stupendous for the figures in the two dimensional world in Edwin Abbott's Flatland to see a three dimensional figuring rising into itself from their world. No doubt the question above is far more interesting than my answer.
Alchemy is far from my strong suit (or even a weak suit), but I was intrigued by this engraving found in Annibel Barlet's Le Vray Et Methodiqve Covrs de La Physiqve Resolvtive, Vvlgairement Dite Chymie: Represent Par Figures Generales & Particulieres. Povr Connoistre La Theotechnie Ergocosmiqve, C'Est Dire, L'Art de Diev, En L'Ovvrage de L'Vnivers..., which was ostensibly a work on alchemy, the second edition (used here) published in 1657. Taking a quick tour through the book it looks far more applied, far more medically-oriented, than a standard work on alchemy. (And by "medical" I'm really meaning "pharmaceutical.) I don't have the knowledge really to say much about the application of the Paracelsian alchemical chemistry and how much the various human natures/humors/metals etc. come into play with the prescription--I'd say offhand that the Rxs would be necessarily a little suspect.
I foudn a curious book called Childrens talk, English & Latin... written by Charles Hoole, and the printed in 1673, in London, ostensibly to teach small ones the properties of Latin. It is filled with interesting stories which are small tests to logic and testaments to what was to be expected behavior, as told in this story of a stolen knife.
One boy asks the other to borrow as knife, but the second boy is reticent, fearful that "it will suffer to travel" and not be returned, and wonders why the borrower needs to borrow, The first boy explains that his knife was missing, and a nice little knife it was: little, dull, with a blunt point, brass studs, with a hole at the top. This is the description of the knife that the second boy is carrying, the first boy then putting the case to the second that this knife belongs to him, and that it was taken away, stolen. The second boy makes the cases that the knife may well have belonged to boy one, but now it was his, having purchased it fair and square.
"Surely it is a knife" says boy one.
"That means nothing to me" says boy two;
"But dare you buy stolen goods" boy one, to which the other responds with a sharp ""any without any difference". This must've angered the knife pursuer, who states that anyone willfully and knowingly purchasing stolen goods is also committing a crime, "But you are as Ill as a thief". The second boy is unmoved, stating "Put cases I am not".
It all finally boils out that the case is taken to the school Master, who adjudicates in an interesting fashion--you'll just have to read for yourself, below. It is all very interesting to me, shaping an argument for kids, having them think something through, and then have it all make sense in the end. And in Latin.
Henry Bacon (1866-1924) was the architect of the Lincoln Memorial--it was his last major assignment and I should say his greatest. I found in the Library of Congress some of the drawings he made (completed 1910-1917) envisioning the space, and they included what might very loosely be called pentimenti of the statue of Lincoln that was to be provided by Daniel Chester Smith (1850-1931). They are really just placeholders, models, of how the finished statue would occupy the space. When I saw these drawings I realized how perfectly the finished works lived together.
The Blob is probably not a "science fiction" movie because, well, it has very few science-y bits to it; it is also probably not a "monster" movie, either, as the Jell-O-like gelatinous character moved like an ancient stub-legged fat-dog that a person could slowly out-crawl to make good an escape. Maybe it really wasn't so much a "movie" at all, but more like a tonic, a slight refresher enjoyed only at the film's ending when you've realized that a cool 75 minutes was had in a refrigerated environment scooped out of a hot August day in 1958.
It was about a creeping fear of some sort. I doubt that the screenwriters had anything more to say about fear than that they would fear if their movie didn't generate some human monies. But fear was big and very creeping in the United States at that time--the fullness of the Cold War was really just coming into its monumental and grinding play, with nuclear catastrophe lurking at every other corner. Literally--city life was festooned with traffic signals and Civil Defense signs, the later showing the way for folks to crowd into underground or moderately protected areas to outweigh the cold heat of radioactivity and protect them from megatons of explosive sewage. Children at school were to take refuge from the
giant fireball under wooden desks1, families built bomb shelter (complete with food and weapons to ensure the food stayed in the family), orderly evacuation plans for millions of cars were devised to empty out NYC and Boston and Chicago so that the even/odd license plates could be distributed properly into the countryside, plans were made to de-centralize cities so that the entire country would be a massive suburb, and on and on, into the empty nuclear night.
Nuclear annihilation was the great, arching fear above the still-massive supporting fear of Communism, the destroyer of decency and morality and god and individuality and everything else that there was to lose. Overt fear coming from the USSR; covert fear coming in the form of Fifth Column folks, infiltrators, screenwriters, conning actors, deviant milkmen, mischevious politicos, liberals, artists: everywhere from anything. Spot the Red/or Make me Dead.
Creeping Communism was everywhere and from everywhere the battle of fear must have been fought, which partially explains America's growing involvement with the doomed French as that country strained against all reasonableness to maintain control of the country of Vietnam. Fighting Ho Chi Minh since the end of the Second World War, the French finally ran out of themselves at Dien Bien Phu, which also marked the real beginning of U.S. involvement there (having already spent some billions in an ill-advised support of the cancerous French occupational effort). Among the first American casualties in that long war would be an Army officer whose last words before being killed were in French: "Je suis Americaine". (The first true casualty in that war--as Goethe has said--was truth).
There was much in the science fiction world that suggested this fear, utter and complete devastation via aliens invasion or runaway nuclear strikes, all of which could be read about or seen in the movies, all supplements to the Great Fear going on outside. Television would occasionally address these issues but in far lesser numbers than cloak-and-dagger great-goodness of the pathology of nice that was seen going on throughout America, the stuff that makes many people nostalgic for those times--Leave it to Beaver and such. June Cleaver never had to deal with her boys getting burnt to a crisp at school under their desks.
[1951]
The Blob's monster wasn't as fantastic as others, and its arrival was never really a question for consideration. The teens depicted in the movie (including the lead-teen, played by just-shy-of-30 Steve McQueen) weren't really rebelling against anything except for a ruffled deputy sheriff, and at he generations managed to pull themselves together with much fuss to fight the strange invader.
There were of course no Black people in this movie. Perhaps to white America, Blacks were another creeping fear coming in the guise of desegregation in the great and powerful landmark case of Brown v Board of Education. And Elvis. Elvis, as the personification of early Rock and Roll, was seen as subjugating the morality of youth and corrupting culture in general with his music, much of which owed its existence to Black people.
Back to The Blob: the cure to the terror of its creep was easily found; and, once so, its disposal was just a matter of short time. It was a ridiculously easily solution. Cold. The great creeping terror was frozen immutable by cold, and dropped (by parachute) somewhere near the North Pole, where it was to stay frozen forever. Not so much with Slim Pickens/Major Kong riding his "Hey John" nuke down the throat of the Russkie first strike capacity, which in Dr. Strangelove found fire fighting fire, with everything ending up in flame. In the simple The Blob, perhaps the feel-good message was the Cold War being won in the cold? Well, I doubt that highly--int he end, it was just a not-good film, signifying nothing. But the rest of all the other fears were very real.
It is remarkable though that one of the greatest fears invented by humans in the 20th century--nuclear annihilation--is today pretty much abandoned, save for the rogue elements here and there trying to deliver a dirty bomb to some populous place. Certainly discussions of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doesn't pop up anymore except in history classes. And so fear comes and goes. Such a fear was created with the adoption of equal (Voting) rights for women, and the equalizing of human rights for Black people. The consequences of these changes were enormously fear by the status quo; a few decades later, the fear and its representations look silly (as in "how-could-that-possibily-have-been?) to our children. It makes me wonder what that Great Fear that beguiles so many today will be an embarrassment in 2030? Gay marriage? Immigration? Both are excellent candidates. Problem is, there are many others.
There are in the history of belief and art instantaneous evolutions of various sorts--most famously of course in creation myths, and these most easily followed today in their images relating Old Testament belief, such as in the creation of the world, or more specifically in the example1 (left) the creation of light. But here we see the post-creation part, the vision of creation, the achievement. It seems as though we don't really get to see the instantaneous creation half-way-through, or rarely so, the instant-evolution not quite complete.
I guess that we are recommended to believe the stuff in the middle, to assume it complete, to accept the Angel of Presumption to fill in the necessary blanks. (And here I'm not talking about the "Angel of Presumtpion" of Caedmon who refers to Satan in this way--I'm just taling about the Angel that bridges the missing bits in neural napping parts of real and suspect stories and events, the aid to continuity in imagination).
There are exceptions of course, though it seems like there are not many--one good example is the creation of Eve. In many Renaissance examples illustrating the Old Testament story we see Eve as she is emerging from the side of Adam, a snapshot of the process of the creation of woman that is also in some special way also a product of evolutionary development, only instantly. This would seem to remove this from consideration of being an "evolutionary" development, though there are more modern examples of a "faster" evolution, quicker and more reactive adaptation (as in the case of Galapagos finches study by Peter and Rosemary Grant2 (Princeton), or the mercurial DNA changes to white flies in response to the introduction of certain bacteria.
[Source:woodcut from Biblia cum postillis, Nicolai de Lyra, printed in Venice in 1489.]
But the creators of creations myths from which the stories of Adam and Eve have descended are long and very old, and the process of change in these cases didn't concern them--it was the outcome that was important.
We do see this process displayed elsewhere to be sure, but it is a very uncommon peep into the creation of certain states of affairs. Here's a another good example again coming from the Adam and Eve saga, this one showing the creation of man from clay--"Erschatflung des Menschen aus Lehm", from the great Liber cronicorum, and printed by Anthonis Koberger in Nurnberg in 1493:
The images showing partial development of a theme do seem to rest more heavily on the shoulders of Eve than anything else I can think of, presently. There are many images that show events simultaneously, where on a single panel or canvas we will see a painting depicting multiple periods of time in a person's life, or a depiction of the Fall of Man showing temptation/apple-eating/Archangel banishment--but this is not a depiction of the instantaneous event in the process of creation.
These photographs are remarkable capsules of space and time--they hold the mostly-realized fates of their subjects, taken into custody in Sydney for crimes from prostitution to stealing to loitering to bigamy to murder and around and around. The poses are interesting in that there seems to be no unified way of making them, which means that most often the detained person had the opportunity to adopt whatever posed they pleased, given the emotional constraints of their situation. Some are defiant, some at complete ease in front of the camera; others are completely distracted and scared, and embarrassed and guilty. There also doesn't seem to be a segregated point for making the photographs, tough there is a common-looking wall and hallway for some of them. It would be interested to know if the Sydney police were making an editorial statement by placing their subjects in unflattering locations, like standing near a dripping faucet, or amidst trash, or in a garden, or in front of toilets. In any event the range of emotions is remarkable, even for looking through only a few hundred of the more than 100,000 images that are on line here and there from the good folks in Sydney. [The images below all started out their life at Sydney Justice and Police, and then used in parts by the following websites and blogs from which I harvested my selection below,: Retronaut , the Independent,, Live Journal the Daily Mail, and the Historic Houses Front (which also has full-ish records for each photograph). An interesting interpretation of many of the images can be found at SCAN.
Analytically interesting, an interpretative invitation. Apprehensive?
I came across this fantastic representation of the stages of human life in the beautifully-named book by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, All the Properytees of Thyings, which was published in Westminster in 1495 (and also known as De proprietatibus rerum, also translated as On the nature of things, or On the properties of things), and which was originally written around 1225). The book was a bestiary, a marvelous encyclopedia, a collection of all things as known in the 13th century--it would be interesting to represent all that is know today and compact it into a workable, logical, usable (printed !) book of a thousand pages. One of those many images was this:
a simple, compact reminder to the book's readers about the progression of life. Infant, toddler (in a Renaissance walker), child (at games), teen (adopting some of the trappings of adulthood), prime-of-life, middle aged and then the leaning elder.
It strikes me that the idea of "stages" is what most of what experience might be--the ideas of "stages" and "progression" are everywhere, even perhaps in the places they shouldn't be. There are simple things like rockets that keep releasing smaller and smaller stages of itself until it gets down to the (satellite etc.) nub; sleep has its five stages resulting in the final resting state of r.e.m.,; there are recognized stages of development for psychology (Erikson), and cognition (Piaget) and need (Maslkow) and moral (Kohlberg), and spiritual (Fowler), and economic (lots) and on and on into the progressive stages of the sunset. Progression and series belong in arithmetic and geometry (and etc.) and in the scientific method, as well as music (succession of chords) and disease (more so than health). Examples are limitless. But for right now, I just wanted to post a few images of these antique reminders of progression and mortality...
The Stages of Life, broadside published by James Catnach, London c. 1830. British Museum.
These images—American baseball cards from the 1950’s and early 1960’s—seem to come from an removed, unknown source, at least to me. The odd thing is that I have a recollection for some of these designs, seen in my tender years, and seeing them now is an odd assault on my memory. I do remember the dark reds and the severe cut-outs, but now they look so unusual, so unnatural, 
bizarre, as though the artist who rendered the design had never seen baseball players—or men—before. They might as well have been aliens pouring themselves from their space ship (why do those spaceships have landing lights?), or Americans disembarking from their tall ships in Yokohama harbor in 1859.
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