Author: JF Ptak

Boullee, Lequeu and Ledoux: Reposts of Two Musical Slideshows

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[For another bit on Boullee see also my post Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex]

(1) The Fantastic Self-Portraits of the Visionary Architect, Jean-Francois Lequeu

I guess it is easy to want to call M. Lequeu (1757-1825 (?)) an outsider, though
he was hardly that.

He was an exceptional talent who was exceptionally well-trained (and who won
the highest awards offered by his school), and started out in a staid and
brilliant way, a successful draftsman in his own right, and student of
Scoufflot, helping to design ancient-inspiration buildings for the super
rich. He was at the pinnacle of the drafting trade, though not so on the
designing end. Along came the Revolution
and away went his architectural career—he wound up a surveyor and a
cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and
historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later
(or so, the date is unclear). His post-revolutionary vision was as
phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal. Well, this is
really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs
fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow
larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him. But he was far in
front of the curve so far as popular (public) opinion was concerned. Even among the other visionaries of the time
(like Ledoux and Boullee) it was Lequeu who staked out the furthest reaches of
architecture, and also with great depth and virtuosity.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the
floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper
into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period. I
also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure
eccentricity—his half-dozen or so self portraits are among the most reaching
that I’ve seen (in the pre-modern era).

If Lequeu’s visions existed at all in the world of French architecture it
was in the Deep Underground—a place that he may have founded. He was certainly, at the very least, its
geologist.

His
self portraits are striking, but perhaps not so much more so than those
by Rembrandt–he was certainly exploring modes of expression (Raphael’s
series of engravings on the emotion of the human face is a good example
of this study)–Lequeu though seems to always manage to suggest that he
is an observed inmate somewhere. There is a great undercurrent of
“otherness” and great remove to them–something that makes places the
self portraits into a different–empty, lonely–class.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

(2) Etienne Boullee, Images with Music

I’ve been collecting images by some of the great, visionary
architects of 18th century France: Etienne Boullee (1728-1799),
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques
Lequeu (1737-1825). It was a tough time for these architects to see
far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were
even less deserving than these men lost their heads. In any event I’ve
compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works,
using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway’s love poem to M.
Boullee called The Belly of an Architect.
I couldn’t but help using this music in this context, sorry to say–it
just goes perfectly with these images. (Also, I’ve written about M.
Ledoux here.)

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The Coming Sex War of 1919
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 920

This slight, four-page pamphlet was a flare to the newly enfranchised women of Great Britain¹, a very-shakily congratulatory bit with wide, sniffy overtones of vast male superiority. The author takes the intended (female) reader at a very slow, almost-stopped pace about what voting is all about, turning down the rhetoric to explain what a vote “is”. Not only that, but the following as well:
“It seems, therefore, important to give as simply as possible a brief sketch of:
(1) What Politics are. [Politics is the Science of Government.] (2) The Duties of Citizenship. (3) Coalition Government”.

Just because women got the vote (or partial vote: they had top be over thirty years of age and have property or be
married to a man with property; full voting rights devoid of property requirements didn’t come in until 1928) didn’t
mean that they enjoyed a relaxation of their inferior social caste. The social consciousness of the status of women may have been slightly fragmented in 1918/19, but only enough to introduce them to the world of politics as you would a child—at least as far as this pamphlet is concerned².

But this work comes around a bit, retracting its insulting narrative somewhat by the end of the pamphlet, as what the writer really wanted was to snag a bunch of these women to vote for the Coalition Candidate, Mr. Lloyd George, in the General Election of December 1918. Their votes were definitely wanted, and the need was addressed, if not without a little fear that women would retract themselves and form their won party. The pamphlet states:

“If the Voters are mean and corrupt, they will get what they deserve…There is a movement among women at the present time, especially among those who were most active in working for the Vote, to refuse to join any of the old political Associations, but to form a Women’s Party or Federation of Women. Such a step is to be very much regretted, for it will certainly lead to a sort of sex war, men and women being divided into opposite camps, each fighting for their selfish ends.”

Assuring women of what a “vote” and “politics” are, and demanding that the priorities of “women’s political parties” would lead to a “sex war”, the author blandly asks his (!) readers to vote for Lloyd George.

Notes
1. The countries granting partial or full voting
  rights to women prior to the U.S (1920) include: New Zealand (full voting privileges),
  1893; Australia, 1902 (partial); Finland, 1906; Norway (able to stand for
  election); Denmark (1915); Iceland (1915); Canada (1917); Austria, Estonia,
  Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
  Russian Federation, United Kingdom (partial) (1918); Belarus, Belgium , Luxembourg, Netherlands,
  Ukraine (1919); Albania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, United States of
  America (1920).
2. As
  beautiful a thinker as Darwin
  was his mind regarding women of the mid-Victorian age was pretty modest,
  treating his own wife as a sort of advanced child. She never did get a key to the key
  cabinet at Downs…
(I should point out an earlier post that I made about the coming equality of women in voting and lung cancer, “Deathly Equality: Liberty, Lung Cancer and Women’s Rights“.)
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Killing London with the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books Post 920

Sir Charles Bressey
didn’t really try to “kill” London, of course, though parts of his Greater London plan for redirecting and accommodating increasing vehicular traffic certainly would’ve destroyed some great beauty had some of his suggestions been implemented.

I have no doubt that Sir Charles was on the right path to something, here and there, but all I have access to regarding his work appears as an article in The Illustrated London News (28 May 1938), and much of it looks like a absurdo-horror/sci-fi setting for a film by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton. I can hear the noise of this city, and it ain’t pretty: a road through Hyde Park, floating pontoon car parks in the Thames, , elevated highways sitting on top of apartment buildings, removing Piccadilly “Circus”, removing the “park” part of Hyde Park, and so on.

(Very slightly related is this post from 2008 featuring a self-defence plan that would semi-encapsulate London (1938))

And so I’ll pass along these images of “traffic improvements” without too much comment, letting them speak for themselves.

Trafalgar Square as a triple-decker parking deck. (What can one say?)

Hyde Park, with a semi-submerged road cutting through the heart of the place.

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Flying Wing Aircraft, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 919

What can I say? I just like the flying wing. Also I should point out that the Illustrated London News is an excellent resource for schematic cut-aways like this–I think that I have 125 or so of them here for the 1910-1945 period.

Junkers built this fabulous flying (“inhabited”) “wing only”
aircraft, sending it up for commercial service in 1929 as the largest airplane
in the world. Only two were built (though a Japanese military knock-off ran to a production quantity of six), and I imagine that it was quite expensive making the Berlin-London flight, cruising in around at 109 mph.

I would like to know what the artist was thinking about when he decided to draw a standing man in the sleeping compartments. Not only that, the fellow is looking straight at the artist…perhaps it is a sly, tiny self-portrait?

Notes

1. Plane specifications:

Crew: Seven (including a full-time engineer who could
service the plane’s four engines from inside the plane).

Capacity: between 30 and 34 passengers, depending upon
variation of the aircraft.

Length: 75 ft

Wingspan:
144 ft

Height: 23 ft

Wing area: 3,122 sq ft

Empty weight: 32,893 lbs

Loaded weight: 52,900 lb

Max takeoff weight: 46,826 lb

Maximum speed: 140 mph

Cruising speed: 109 mp

Range: 2,150 miles

Service ceiling: 12,100 ft

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Missing “Dots” and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads. Today’s bit combines the “Blank, Empty and Missing Things” with “The History of Dots” categories.]

Alfred
Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and
photographer, is best known for things other than what he should
probably be best known for: his discovery of the third element of the
blood, platelets. Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very
first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention
of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy. As a matter of fact,
Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault, produced the very
first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of
1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical
illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the
great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their
children.) The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹–preceding two
other works published in the same year–does indeed identify the new
object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the
new body, calling the new units “globulins du chyle” (or small globules, derived
from plasma). He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the
combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept
his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations
not being present.

And so we remember Donne for some other significant
things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, “dots”.

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l’origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168.

(Overall the history of the
discovery of platelets is complicated:
Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782) were the first to fully describe the “undefined”
particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in
1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and
then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler
then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the
first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets
not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis. Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me
history.)

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Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 917

[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty
Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing
things making holes]

1. The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov¹ wanted to make it very clear
to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during
the winter war of 1939/1940.

2. Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near
Finnish cities were actually airbases.

2.1   Also, since the
complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see”
what was being bombed.

3. If there were civilian targets that looked as though they
were being bombed, then

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

    3.2 if anything at all was going on the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was dropping
bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.

4.   So far as
undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet
Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.

5.   Therefore, what
we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses
were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.

Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of
Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland. Also, if there were people being killed in
these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft
workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.

This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940
issue of The Illustrated London News;
the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards
of the bomb and its effect on its target.

It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the
new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent
attacks on Finnish cities. [The 5’ bomb
was made to be deployed in two sections:
the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of
incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall
away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]

Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against
non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons
the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.

This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration
shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military
advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet
attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2
February 1940.

The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the
murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation,
disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched
in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above. Stalin was ignored to the point of
non-existence, de-Stalinized and left
entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia² published just a few years after his 1953
death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 – 1953)
right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the
Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his
existence 30 years earlier.

Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins
against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination
of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government
following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962) and managed to live out the rest of his life
alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.

(The “Molotov Cocktail” by the way was not named for him by
Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was
named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting
against the Soviets invading their country in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)

Notes

1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the
Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”)
Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of
Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland. The fierce Finns never lost their
independence, though they did lose a part of their country.

2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history,
winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very
questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.

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What 1.5 Billion Pounds Bought the Military in 1938: Finding a Gem Inside a Great Graphic

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The Illustrated London News for 27 February 1937 hosted a brilliantly designed graphic illustrating the ways in which the British War department could/should spend 1.5 billion pounds (or about $100 billion in 2009 dollars, sort of) over a five-year period as the price of keeping the peace. Of course they wouldn’t make it but a quarter of that distance as Austria fell to Czechoslovakia which fell to Poland and the end. The full-page pictorial effort is to the right:

Nestled in the corner of this page–at about 2×1 inches–is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

Followed by the full smidgen of the overall page of comparisons and analogies:

Then there’s the semi-standard presentation of what the Navy could purchase:

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

And the Air Force (which if you look closely includes a balloon barrage facility at upper right):

By far the most interesting to me is the hidden gemoid of Queen Marys, all produced by the fabulous G.H. Davies, who did many hundreds of such images and sectional cutaways and plans and technical drawings for the ILN over a 25-year period. M.r Davies may well be my favorite technical artist of this period.

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When Civilians Aren’t Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the
first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of
eliminating things and people in civilized settings by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them
from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship
during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and
King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the
physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and
intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated
exponentially–virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future
effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly
in the form of the Hague Conference
(1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled,
if not outlawed.

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians”
and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to
(completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to
racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended”
cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the
these awful bits of bombing. And for another example of this I turn to
the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound,
to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having
done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their
resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous
practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s
independence: it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945
(which also included many other places like Aleppo,
Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings
of Damascus in
1925. For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the
French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they
were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions
were not illegal. (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the
League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human,
finding categories for barbarians and savages. It was acceptable to bomb
those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue
a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the
Muslim population centers in Damascus
as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them
their problems. October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage
occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was
about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the
French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action;
civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if
the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and
occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense
were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever
international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations.

These are just a few examples from the French; there are
plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year. (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians
at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica
in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on
and on.)

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect
the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof
architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical. Such is the price of trying to make your
people happy. I happen to have

a few in
my files, which are seen above and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn’t necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be. Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter. And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower. And I’m not talking atomic.

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“The First Thing is to Find Some Men” How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 914

[Continuing the posts “What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941” and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Do Boys Like You? is
the name-of-the-game for girls, evidently (“set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s
affection. Just one boy—any boy…”),
brought to you as a part of a long, continuing series by Elizabeth Woodward in
the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early
1940’s.

This installment is about getting a boy for a date, and how to make
oneself getable and datable and boy-friendly, all while maintaining the
thinnest veneer of self-acknowledgment (“be adaptable as a chameleon”) as possible while staying true to “yourself”. It is a cocktail of overall old-lady sense
and deep ruffled bows writ by the hand of gender entrapment and not-so-subtle
subjugation. Let’s get to it with some of the more archaeologically-interesting
statements of this social-norms-establishing pamphlet:

Paragraph: (Intro):

“Do boys like you, or don’t they? Its as easy as that! Either you have dates and go places with lots
of boys, or they don’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Paragraph: “A Female World”

“…the first thing is to find some men.” (Which is odd
because “men” is used only one other time beyond this reference—its all boys
and nothing but boys.)

“Short of throwing yourself on their (boys’) mercy, see if
you can’t wrangle an introduction out of the girls who do know boys…”

“Your parents could invite their friends over for dinner and
ask them to bring along their son. And you do a good job on him!” (I’m not sure
what that “job” is.)

“They (boys) can’t find you if you’re packed away in a mob
of females.”

Paragraph: “A Rank Outsider” (on being the new girl in a
community):

“The girls have things under control and they don’t want any
interference from you.”

“You might know more than they do, and you just might talk
down your pug nose at them.”

“…you’d better get accustomed to traveling alone…”

“Give them every chance to find out that you aren’t high
hat, that you like the same things they do, that you aren’t out to sniggle
their men away…”

“When they (the girls) accept you, the boys will too…”

Paragraph: “an Old Story”

“(Boys) are so used to looking at you that they think of you
as furniture.You’ve got to be new!”

“If you’re fat and pudgy, make yourself lean, sleek and
smart.”

Paragraph “Take it Easy”

“…its going to take practice to make boys like you. Take it
easy. Set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s affection. Just one boy—any boy…”

Paragraph “A Few Gentle Hints” (Seems that we’ve gone way beyond this by now.)

“Don’t run around with girls who are dud.”

“Don’t go in pairs with a girl who is overwhelmingly popular…Better
pick a girl who will give you an even break.”

“Don’t languish for some local ‘hero’ who is sought after by
all the girls in town. He may be
good-but he’s far out of reach…”

“Don’t pick on a lad who has never had a date with a girl.”

“Don’t be careless or sloppy when you’re talking with boys…”

“Don’t expect (or even hope) that every boy you meet will
ask you for a date.”

And (not quite) lastly, but should’ve been:

“Don’t go around thinking about boys constantly.”

But lastly thus:

“Act as though you are having fun. Be alive, gay and enthusiastic. Be interested in what’s going on. Be sweet, tactful, and adaptable as a chameleon. Have definite likes and dislikes, but don’t be so rigid
that you are stubborn, opinionated and difficult to get long with. Be carefree,
casual, easy, willing to play and fun to play with. And don’t be shy about
liking the boys.

THEN THE BOYS WILL LIKE YOU! [Emphasis in the original.]

My poor mother would’ve been reading this…

(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing out that the chap on the
cover carrying the girl away has joined the fabric of her skirt to (1) hold
onto and steady her and (2) make sure her skirt doesn’t fly up and out and is not actually touching her thigh…)

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Red Sky in the Renassiance: the Reverse of Geometry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 913

What
if our eyes worked in the “opposite” way?
What if we somehow broadcast the lines of reality from our eyes¹ rather
than receive photonic emissions from the physical world, that we didn’t specify
the wavelength and frequency of light, and that somehow electromagnetic rumblings
in the “visual range” didn’t apply to our sense of sight?

This
would certainly make for an interesting existence
if somehow the elements around us weren’t necessarily so. Perhaps this is sort of replacement reality
is just what has been going on in the entire history of humans, altering the
landscape to make it more suitable for our existence, a long history of
painting the physical landscape with something more “suitable”, an
individualized creation.

This
all came up wondering about this fantastic sky, produced 475 years before
non-representational art and 455 years before Gauguin started applying big blankets of red² : it seems to me
in a distant impression that it is a representation of vision that is more a projector
than a camera.. The end result of this
emission and wayward thought is the fabulous red sky in the painting Nativity by Master Francke³ (ca.
1424-1436) is a fantastic red sky with lustrous stars.

The
painting is otherwise filled with the common reliables of Renaissance iconography
concerning the nativity: the place of “birth”
(a stable or barn-like building, also sometimes appearing as a classical ruin
or cave), a flock of sheep, a stand of trees, and the watch sensate gazes of the near by
beasts. Mary is ecstatic in the same ways
that Joseph is usually not—to me, he usually seems pretty detached from the
whole deal, lost in another space. The
baby Christ is again just a little man (and not a baby) laying there on the barren
ground. [I’ve wondered about Joseph’s
detachment: perhaps the whole scene is
nothing but mysterious, a complexity far removed from his reach and
understanding, a notion of an act that is so phenomenal that there is no
retrievable reaction for it, and so he looks away. Later on in the history of Mary and Joseph,
and deep into the 19^th century when the Immaculate Conception—that is,
the sexless conception of Mary the mother of Christ which she would later accomplish
for her own baby—the issue of Joseph’s own virginity comes up, mounting the
confusion no doubt in Joseph’s already-full head.]

But
back to the sky: certainly skies and
backgrounds of pure gold and blue painted by the masters in Sienna
and Florence
abound during this time, but red is quite unusual. The sky is accented by the terrific red of
the wings of the angels and more softly so in the hair of the (long-fingered) Madonna.

There
is also the issue of the hole in the sky, revealing the large-handed Creator with glimpses
of the alternate, higher, existence visible in the background, a taste of the
alpha (or omega?) part of the long arch of Earth-borne humanity.

Notes

1.The discussion of optics and vision is one of the most spectacular conversations ever held in the history of science and philosophy (along with “time”, “motion” and “the void”. I think that Leonardo would’ve come closest in relatively-modern times to understanding vision if he had the real capacity of dissecting the eye (which in spite of many approaches to experiment) would always go flat, leaving him with an unsatisfying mess.

In Aristotle’s Physics (Book II, Part II) we find the following fascinating thought:

“Similar evidence is supplied by the more physical of the branches of mathematics, such
as optics, harmonics, and astronomy. These are in a way the reverse of geometry. While
geometry investigates physical lines but not qua physical, optics investigates
mathematical lines, but qua physical not qua mathematical”

A classical position of the emission theory of optics is stated by Hero in his Definitions:

“Optics does not deal with physical questions and does not study whether given rays
flowing out from the eyes go forth to the boundaries of objects or whether images that are
detached go forth from corporeal objects [and] enter the eye along a rectilinear path or
whether the intervening air is stretched or contracted by the ray-like pneuma from the
eye. It is only concerned whether, at each reception (of an image) the right direction of
movement or tension is maintained as well as the requirement that the convergence to a
point occurs at an angle when objects are seen that are larger or smaller than the eye.”

(My thanks to Dr. Kim Veltman for these quotes from her Continuity and Discovery in Optics and Astronomy, Studies on Leonardo da Vinci http://www.sumscorp.com/books/contin/title.html)

2. I had Gauguin’s 1888 “After the Sermon/Jacob Wrestling the Angel” in mind for an example of this.

3. Master Francke active (c. 1424 –
36 ), Nativity, in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; oil on oak,
39×35 inches. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. “German painter who worked in Hamburg, where in 1424 he painted a huge altarpiece for the company of merchants who traded with England, the so-called ‘Englandfahrer Altar’, originally placed in their chapel in the Johanniskirche (remnants in Hamburg, Kunsthalle). When closed, the double-winged altarpiece displayed four scenes from the life of S. Thomas Becket, the patron saint of the company, above four scenes from the life of the Virgin (e.g. Nativity;).
Opened, the altarpiece showed scenes from the Passion of Christ. Francke was a leader of the northern German version of International
Gothic. He had close links with French book illumination (he may
have worked in Paris for some time) and the
paintings of the Rhineland, especially those
of Conrad van Soest
, though it is not known where he received his training.”

Other Nativity scenes as follows:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — Color Theory — Perception — Perspective