Author: JF Ptak

Was it really Jan van Eyck and not J.C. Maxwell who produced the first color photograph?  Van Eyck’s after all is hanging up in Bruges in the Groeninge Museum, and Maxwell’s, well, Maxwell’s dissipated in about half an hour, leaving only an historical trace.  The problem of course is that Van Eyck’s oil (Virgin of the Canon  van der Paele) was done 403 years before the Daguerre invention (building of course on the work of others, notably Niepce), so it really doesn’t count because it really doesn’t exist.  His work though *does* exist, but not as a photo—it was, is, a painting, finished in 1436, and it stands in my mind as looking so much like a perfect capturing of a moment that it seems a (luscious) snapshot. 

In her book Color and Meaning, Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (1992), Marcia Hall makes the point (on page 69) that it is the lighting in this painting that makes it so extraordinary—and differentiates it entirely from the predictable light or “stage illumination of the Italians”.  Its an excellent point.  The light source in the painting is emanates as though it were a half-hour before sunset in Santa Fe; or here, in Asheville, when there is a very low and nearly complete cloud ceiling and the sun just manages just before sunset to peek through between the mountains and the cloud layers to blaze its extraordinary, horizontal-like brilliance making everything and anything that reflects that light into a work of private art. The figures in this painting by Van Eyck reflect a softer version of that light in such a manner—they are sharply illuminated, luminous, in all of their very human glory and frailty.  We have sharp relief, great detail, deep shadow—and much of that is missing in Italy at this time.

The photo parts come in here:  the characters are caught in the middle of some very small, obscure action, and the smallness of their movements are captured perfectly

Even though they are emotive of course the faces of the great Masaccio are relatively plain; Gozzoli, Fra Lippi, the
magnificent Fra Angelico, Pisanello, Ghirlandaio, della Francesca, Veneziano, di Credi,. Perugino, and even the emotive and colorful Rafael, all working in about the same decades as van Eyck, simply do not give this anatomical expressiveness to the faces of their subjects.

So the extreme light and the detail in the faces gives the van Eyck this fantastical quality—on the other hand the perspective and the proportions of the characters in relation to the objects in the room and the room itself are off, secondary, not important—this too in sharp contrast to the great inventors, re0-discovers, innovators of the scientific perspective.  (This homage belongs to a slightly earlier time, to Giotto and Uccello, but their work is just a bit to early for discussion with van Eyck.)  Marcia Hall goes on in her appraisal about the way in which van Eyck applied his color (“binding his pigments in a drying oil”) to give his subjects their incredible color depth, and this of course is a major element in understanding the picture (coming as it does from a stone-cold expert). 

What I’m thinking now, the aspect that is giving this painting its “photographic” quality, its supra-realistic event, is this new use o flight, new angle, with the immersion of anatomical detail and the “different”, Northern, perspective. 

This is a very, overly, simple observation and simplification, but I think in general that it is true.

Albrecht Durer’s (1471-1528) drawing of a geometrical man was an amazing–startling, even–object to the early 16th century consciousness. His …Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1537) was a masterpiece, and a key piece of visionary thinking.

His Underwysung der Messung (“Treatise on Measuring”) written nearly 500 years ago (in 1525) set the stage for this next work–it is here that we find some of the most recognizable of
Durer’s illustrations of the instruments that he employed to do his perspective work.  Durer–so far as I can tell–created an orthographically rotating human figures in three-dimensional trapezoids, creating incredibly human-like non-human forms.  To the modern eye they look  like supra- or proto- or post-human, perhaps; mechanized, calculated, structural. His use of stereometry, the science of measuring volume, was adapted to this study of human form and the relationship between that and movement. 

They were in a sense a CAT scan.  And in this way the person in 1525, seeing this for the first time, could have been  experiencing something like the sensation of seeing an X-Ray for the first time in 1895 or a magnified flea in 1626, only the image wasn’t magnified nor was it an internal view–it did help in understanding perspective and motion. 

This was a new way of thinking about the body, challenging the god-grace and ubiquitous church-inspired revelation of how it worked.  This was not a necessarily easy time in which to picture humans in such a scientific way.  (In 1553 the physician and theological scholar Michael Severtus would be burned at the stake for his views on the Trinity, Nicean Creed and other related things, though his undeniably revolutionary idea of cardiopulmonary circulation was in itself a direct challenge to church teachings).

Durer’s innovation accommodated empirical observation and allowed for proportional change.  Its importance in relational drawing, anatomical and  technical, cannot be understated, which I think trumped it as a subversive agent to orthodoxy.

Erhard Schoen  (1491-1542)  who was one of the most prolific woodcut illustrators in Europe during this period with more than 116 books to his credit, produced Unnderweissung der proportzion unnd stellung der possen, liegent und stehent…, Norenberg 1542 followed Durer showing that the human form was reducible to connected but discrete Euclidean solids, and thereby was a knowable entity. (It is interesting to footnote here that this work came after a period of a dozen or so years in which Schoen produced many heavily anti-Catholic cartoons, broadsides and illustrations.) 

Close on the heels of Durer was the work of Georg Bauer  (also known as Agricola, 1494-1555) whose De re metallica Liber XII (“12 Books on the Subject of Metals”) in 1556.  This work by Agricola (recognized as one of the founding fathers of a number of disciplines–mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology) was actually more concerned with mining and minerals than the title implies.  It was here, again, that the illustrations were crucial and revolutionary—his book was a chief resource in mining for hundreds of years, due chiefly for its clear and precise how-to illustrations. 

Looks like a Chuck Close of Albert Einstein, yes?  Well, its not–its just a heavily pixilated enlargement of Einstein’s son, Hans Albert Einstein, who at age 3 or 4 looks pretty much like his father, very much so, actually. 

The Mona Lisa smile is another missing–discarded–piece of Einstein’s life.  It belongs to his first wife, Mileva Maric.  She was by most accounts an accomplished mathematician, exceptionally intelligent, and a person of her own.  She nearly succeeded in the males’ world of mathematics, but didn’t .Few women did at that time in history–or at least few succeeded under their own name.  There’s a lively debate among some that Mileva was instrumental in the development of the special theory of relativity (among other things) developed by Albert in 1904/5 and published in the Annalen der Physik in the annus mirabilis of 1905.  Personally I doubt that she contributed significantly to the theoretical composition of the theory; I haven’t much of a doubt that she contributed materially to its development, being an intelligent and capable foil/sounding board/conversant with her husband.  As anyone who is a partner in a relationship of two intelligent people realizes, there is a lot of back and forth going on in the development and creation of ideas.  I don’t have any doubt that something like that went on here.

But Albert was done with her by 1914 or so, living basically apart until their official divorce in 1919..  He had minimal relations with Hans Albert.  Eduard developed schizophrenia in his 20’s and that was about it so far as his father was concerned–he was cared for by Mileva until her death in 1948 and then died in an institution in 1965.) And he was particularly done with his daughter Liserl, a baby that he made with Mileva. a girl who simply disappears.  She was born in 1901, and born in “secret”–though it was not a secret to her, or her mother.  She’s gone by 1902.  Then her parents manage to marry in 1903.  The next year Albert tries again at fatherhood witrh Hans Albert, but I think his attention span for children has a relatively short event horizon.  Eduard is born in 1910, but the development of his mental disorder divorces him from hi sfather for good.  It is simply not a pretty story. 

Einstein went on his personal life full of what I see as complications, abandonments, deceptions; living with all sorts of shadows, with a hollowness, there, somewhere. 

I don’t really care to think about Albert’s personal story, and I don’t read his flea-combed biographies I’m perfectly happy to just deal with the intellectual history of his life and be satisfied with that.  But there are days like today, when I think about people celebrating his personal life–as in his birthday–that I sense the emptiness, and wonder about Hans Albert, and Mileva, and Eduard, and the Lost Girl, Liserl.  I think that rather than celebrating Einstein’s personal milestones that we take a moment to remember the countable but countless lives like Mileva who are simply discarded, and that their lives meant as much to them as Einstein’s life meant to him. 

At least Mileva derves a gravestone.

Michele Zackheim wrote an interesting book on Lieserl, Einstein’s Daughter, if you’re interested. 

JF Ptak Science Books LLC 

It leaves me with such a cozy
feeling to not find what I think is an obvious-but-odd phrase in Google.

 And that’s what happened with
“the first photograph of a smell” (or “photograph of a smell”
or odor, for that matter),  as shocking
to the senses as it might be.

There are long and interesting lists
of firsts in photography: the first
color photograph (Maxwell, 1867, but impermanent), the first photograph of a
human face, the first photograph of the moon, the first photo of a planet, and
so on, tirelessly, until we see how many derivations of “firsts”
there are. (We can go from first photo
of human to first photo of a human face to first photo of a human in motion to
the first photo showing human hands to the old human recorded by photography
tot eh first photo of a couple to the first photo of a human with a tool and on
and on.) There is a shorter list of “first photographic non-photograph of
a photograph” (?!) that I wrote about in an earlier (illustrated) post,
but we won’t go there today.

Here is a “first” though
that I think hasn’t been dealt with too terribly much: the first photograph of an odor.

These beautiful images appeared in the 10 September 1938 issue of The
Illustrated London News and were exhibited at the 83rd Annual International
Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society, and were made by H. Devaux (who
evidently, according to the snippet of an obituary that I can see from Science
magazine, was a plant physiologist and “pioneer of surface physics”

who died in 1956). The note accompanying the photographs read: “The emission of an odor involves
volatillisation of material. If an
odiferous material is enclosed in a cell a few millimeters above a clean
mercury surface, it is possible to collect on the surface of the mercury a
monomolecular layer of the volatillising or odoriferous substance. If the mercury surface initially is covered
with talc powder, the gradual formation of the monomolecules layer may be
observed as the talc is gradually pushed away from the point immediately below
the specimen of material.”

The photos
are that of the odors of a lily and of camphor. I don’t know which is which, and a good story could be made up for
either photo belonging to either item. Needless to say, these images are as gorgeous as they are unexpected,
especially considering that they were made in 1938.

FOOTNOTE:

I’d just like to add here the first photograph of a human being–well, actually, it is the first photograph that just happens to capture a human in the emulsion (discussed
very nicely on the Doug’s Darkworld  blogsite.  Since the  exposure time was so terribly long for this image to be made, the moving people and horses and carriages on the street, all of the city-life bits, were necessarily spectral, invisible, to the photograph.  Only the stationary items were captured, and the only people captured here were two figures in the foreground, doing something or other that made them still for at least five minutes–long enough for their anonymous but famous photonic impressions to be captured.   Mr. Doug and others seem to think this is a man getting his boots shined–I agree.

The X-Ray of the Imagination:  Internal Dialog, Demons, Humors, and Picturing the Stuff of Thought–On the outer shapes of the inner container

In an earlier post I wrote about what I thought was the first graphic representation of  the process of forming and
imaging a complex thought (found in Francis Galton’s Visualizing Numeracy). It is interesting how people tried—over a long period of time—to get at exactly that, the inner process, via some sort of external means, which is almost entirely left in the not-so-exclusive world of the science-like.

Perhaps the greatest early effort (and certainly the most beautiful yet) to ascribe physical locations and attributes to the mind was the work and drawings of Robert Fludd.  That would be Dr. Robert Fludd (1574-1637), occultist/philosopher, randy logician and hermticist astrologer pseudo-scientist; and maybe the best of his work is found in his fabulously titled work Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser…), published in Germany between 1617 and 1621.  Things get very deep and complex and confusing, even in the illustrations; so as far as being a key to human knowledge, Fludd probably relaxed the confusion boundaries more than he strengthened insight—but maybe that was supposed to be his job, what with supposedly being a Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion

Another great effort in the attempt to physically determine what might be going on inside someone’s brain and mind were the physiognomists. Physiognomy (does it really matter how it is spelled?  I should think that if I was to try and determine how I should spell the word using the very methods its practioners employed that the spelling might change daily…) from the Greek, basically meaning “nature” and “interpret”, claimed an ability to judge the scope of a brain by the shape of its container—the skull.  If a skull was sunken or distended or high or pretty or what have you then this shape in some way related to the development of that area of the brain.  So a high forehead could mean great insight or knowledge or intellectual ability; a low, sloping forehead meant, well, not, and to steer clear of such people with your
hand firmly on your purse.  An early practioner was the very formidable Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (in the Religio Medici), but the powerhouse thinker (as it were) was Lavater (1741-1801), who caused and challenged all manner of mischief. The democratic nicety of this pseudo-science is that you didn’t really need to be associated with any extended scientific thought to engage in its application—a nice silhouette-maker would do, along with a series of interpretive and a decent personality was about all you needed.  A nice clear forehead would help.

Nipping at the heels of Johann Caspar Lavater and company was Franz Gall (1758-1828) and the Phrenologists (from the Greek again, “mind knowledge”), who made a slight step beyond simple head shape by “reading” the bumps and indentations of the skull.  Their educated fingers were in this way were supposed to have the capacity to feel the special elements of that part of the brain manifesting itself via cranial nodules or something.

Pathognomy was yet another step in the stairs to the flooded basement, where passions and emotions resident in the voice, or gesture, or facial expression, would somehow reveal the structure of the mind.  I found this one pretty curious because it concentrated on the motions of the physical ramifications of the brain, which somehow seemed very elegant in a ghost-like, narcotized way.

But this is just the attempts to ascertain thought—actually picturing it, literally, was not all that common.  Dreams,
fears, thoughts, pain, interpretative inner dialog—seems to have occupied artists far less than love or creed or ambition or devotion.  Being able to “see” someone’s pain, or nightmares, was really quite special.

Thomas Cruikshank made this a sub-specialty for himself, depicting people suffering extreme anguish as a result of gout, or delirium tremens, or fear, and anthropomorphizing them, giving these concerns/fears/pains a human-like quality.  So instead of seeing  a badly inflamed gouty ankle and imaging its pain, we see anti-cherubs, demons, spikey creatures at work on the ankle, pricking it, setting it on fire.

Bosch of course performed miracles in setting out the fear of the Lake of Fire in very explicit, basic, understandable ways.  In my opinion though the Chinese Hell Screens (as a genre) have Mr. Bosch beat by a long mile, as they were terminally specific in elucidating even what might seem to be trivial transgression for the casual viewer.  (For example, a person who wasted paper would, according to one scroll, spend eternity in a lake of flaming feces, bobbing to the surface occasionally to be stuck in the face by a flaming spear.  Now THAT’S Hell!)

We have certainly seen people in the throes of nightmare in art, but the relative subtlety of the visions of Henry
Fueli (The Nightmare, 1782) and William Blake (“Jeruslaem”, 1820, for example) and of course Fransico de Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (from Los Caprichos) really do wane in comparison to some of the highly explicit horrors of Cruikshank and James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson.  Perhaps this is so because the later group seems to address the masses and making the nightmare more universal, visiting the ample-butted poor as it would the couch-bound Faintress of the Upper Classes. (I guess I should really remove Goya from the former class, as he really did intend to reach the working poor as much as anyone else.)

I’ve wondered about the artist Arcimbaldo—the genius portrait painter whose artistic palette was fruits and vegetables—and whether his use of various types and shapes of foods were supposed to correspond to any internal dialogs in the person sitting for him but, well, I think not.  Nice thought, though.

Most effective though in graphically revealing the inner workings of someone’s mind is, yes, the word balloon, which takes a second seat to its younger sibling, the glorious thought balloon.

What a fantastic creation!

The word balloon, or the idea for it, exists for quite some time in Mesoamerica, incised in sculptures from 1000 years
ago.  (See Hull, Kerry Michael (2003). “Verbal Art and Performance in Ch’orti’ and Maya Hieroglyphic Writing”).    Something that we begin to recognize in a more modern form comes up in the 12 th century with word scrolls—elegant, flowing, appealing bits of fabric upon which the words of the person in the painting are written.

Word balloons really come into their own in political art in the 18th century (and do have a very curious, artistic affect in their longish, elongated appearance with tiny 3-point type inside).  Sometimes the word balloons look like smoke with words in it—these might be my favorite, as they give the clear impression of the immediate and dissipating nature of most speech.

The Yellow Kid, generally acknowledged as the first “cartoon character”, at first had his speech written directly on his flanged shirt.  It was around 1896 (I think!) that the words moved from his apparel and into a balloon over his head.

The most beautiful innovation though came a little later (exactly when I’m not sure, I’m sorry to say) with the invention of the thought balloon.   What a magnificent idea!  Why hadn’t this concept been employed earlier, anyway?  How come it took until that unparalled period of time—1895-1915, when virtually everthing became “modern”, when just about everything (save politics, unless you include the creation of the concentration camp) experienced a paradigm shift—and not earlier?  Certainly it is common and debased, and runs amok with the very idea of art and its attempt to show the viewer the inner machinations/beauty of its subject; but wouldn’t it be interesting to have the thought balloon for Lisa Gheradini (the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, “Mona”)?

Well, probably not.

But the thought balloon–bubbly, cloud-like apparitions above its thinker’s head—certainly has it place, and is
absolutely a more elegant invention discerning thought than Lavater or even the lovely Mr. Fludd could ever dream.