Art History – Page 9 – JF Ptak Science Books

A Note on the Most Famous Missing Doorknob in the History of Art

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1921 [Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

[See also the recent post on Mona Lisa’s Missing Jewelry.]

In the category of upper-levels things gone missing (though not nearly in the same category as entire libraries that have been destroyed over time) is the theft of the Mona Lisa. This is an odd story full of detail and holes that could have been the work of one man, Vincent Peruggia (born in 1881 and pictured above in his mugshot) and who with extreme naviete thought he could steal the painting and sell it to the Uffizi and regain the prestige of Italy over its own missing masterpiece by a native son. It also could have been the work of a thief/forger team of Marque Eduardo de Valfierno and Yes Chaudron who set Peruggia to the task of stealing the painting, with Valfierno contracting the sale of as many as six Mona Lisa forgeries to interested parties.

Valfierno’s idea was pretty cunning and diabolical–his only need was to have the real Mona Lisa disappear; then he could have his accomplice forger produce x-number of copies and sell them to x-number of collectors as the real thing. After all, its not as though Mona Lisa owners would have a convention, so the ownership of the world’s most famous and stolen painting would be a very private affair. Also any claim of the real Mona Lisa appearing anywhere else–even restored to its place in the Louvre–would simply be met by the assertion by Valfierno that those “other” Mona Lisas were forgery. So it was forgeries all the way around.

And so Peruggia–an itinerant laborer who made his way to Paris for a better life and who had been working as a carpenter there at the Louvre–stole the painting on 22 August 1911. A Monday, it was, when the Louvre was closed to the public for staff to make repairs and such. Evidently he simply worked his way over to the painting, took it off the wall, got a quiet place and removed it from the big frame (and glass!, which was a new security innovation to protect treasures from crank marauders), and loaded the Mona Lisa under his work smock. (He got the painting out of the building by getting a guard to unlock a door for him–one from which he had previously removed the doorknob, blaming its absence on scofflaws, distracting the man with the key enough to just open the door for Peruggia.)

The blank/missing hanging space of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in the Gallerie Carre was a vivid testament to the power of the painting, with thousands of people trudging by the depressing art-hole to stare at its absence. There were just four iron hooks on the wall, waiting for it, pounded into the plaster between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos.

Once Peruggia had completed the theft he was no longer needed. If Valfierno had actually been involved he would simply have used Peruggia as a fall guy, the many who made the sale of the forgeries possible. Peruggia wound up living in a series of shabby places, working his way back to Italy, perhaps waiting for further instructions, perhaps just a solo agent making his way back home.

If he was an accomplice in a more involved scheme, one could only imagine his frustration in being abandoned–there he was, sleeping on a cot in top of a box filled with his clothing and the Mona Lisa, waiting for something to happen that wouldn’t.

Peruggia found his way back to Florence, staying in Room 20 of the third floor of the Hotel Tripoli Italia on Via Panzoni, which was only hundreds of feet away from where Leonardo had once painted the Mona Lisa. In 1913 he finally contacted officials at the Uffizi in a very weird and awkward attempt to sell it to the museum. He was of course apprehended almost immediately, the museum guardians retrieving the painting from beneath Peruggia’s socks and underwear in the box under his bed.After being exhibited in Italy to tens of thousands of viewers, the Mona Lisa was returned to Paris on 4 January 1914.

Peruggia was evidently quite open about his theft but didn’t have anything to say about accomplices. He was sentenced to a little more than a year for his crime–a sentence very soon after reduced to seven months. Following honorable service in WWI, Peruggia wound up in a suburb of Paris with a family and a hardware store, where he died of a heart attack in 1925. When returned to his hometown following his brief incarceration, he was welcomed as a hero–he may have been more so if he hadn’t demanded a payment for the painting.

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Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Skyscrapers of the Renaissance-Baroque

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There seem to be few designs for Very Tall Buildings in the Renaissance that weren’t churches or towers–I mean, structures with storys, and ninth floors, and small glazes, and so on.

That is why this design for an eleven story building by the architect Jacques Perret de Chambery (in his book Architectura et perspectiva des fortifications et artifices, which was printed in Paris in 1601) bursts into the brain as being so remarkable.

Describing this building and quoting the bookseller site Martayan Lan, Inc. “One extraordinary pavilion would seem to have its
ultimate source in the fifteenth-century Temple of Virtue and Vice
designed by Filarete. It is eleven stories in height, with huge expanses
of glazed openings. Its site plan, the last plate in the publication,
is a beautiful ornamental geometrical design in the manner of du
Cerceau, composed of such elements as gardens, moats, and fortifications
that frame the square, towering pavilion.”

The “Temple/House of Virtue and Vice” referred to above is the work of Antonio di Pietro Averlino (c. 1400 – c. 1469), and also known as”Averulino”and “Filarete” (Greek for “lover of excellence”), a Florentine architect and designer, who produced real and imagined works, a highly-skilled thinker engineer, and who is also remembered for his contributions to the development of urbanism and ideal communities, seen here in his design for the city of Sforzinda, below:

(It is interesting to note that “sforzinda” is awfully close to “sforzado”, a musical term meaning “sudden” or “sharp”, which this design must have seemed to be, back there in the high Renaissance.) [Text and illustrations: Gallica .] The House of Virtue and Vice was a nine story building to be located in Sforzinda, a structure with the highest floors devoted to learning, and the lowest to a house of prostitution. Perhaps the floor placement was reversed.

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Looking Straight Down Department: the Topography of Hell

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1920

The interesting thing about Hell–Dante’s Hell–is that it has been shown and reconstructed and imagined for a long time–eight centuries–and, outside of painting, most of the representations seem to be in cross-section. That is why this image from the famous exposition by Alessandro Vellutello’s 1544 struck me so strongly–it is a mostly straight-down look at the miserly and the prodigal in the fourth circle of Hell.

“… I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?’ –Canto VII, lines 25-30

This image depicts the great, tiring but tire-less, endless, despicable joust of the miserly and the prodigals, going at each other with large, difficult-to-move stones. Pluto is supposed to be in the middle, but I don’t see him here. The artist though has made the men basically unrecognizable, giving them little character to their faces and virtually no differences in their bodies–Virgil tells Dante that they have lost themselves to something else, that there is no “there” there, that Dante–who would normally speak with the people he was coming into contact with–would not be able to interview them as they were too absorbed in their vicious need.

As has been seen in the many maps constructed for the Divine Comedy over the years–but especially during the Renaissance–Hell for Dante was a real place, a nine-layered inverted cone of measured depth and width commensurate with the sin, and established under the city of Jerusalem. Dante visited the place

“… but who art thou
That hast inquir’d of us?” To whom my guide:
“One that descend with this man, who yet lives,
From rock to rock, and show him hell’s abyss.” (Inferno XXIX, 89–92, trans. Cary)

entering Hell on Good Friday and emerging from Purgatory on Easter morning, taking three days to travel through the two places and straight through the center of the Earth.

Here are a few examples of the cross sections that are the great standard bearers of Dante’s visions:

The Hell of Dante by Pietro da Fino, 1568:
Frontispiece of Hell

The circles of Hell from Commedia di Dante insieme con uno dialogo circa el sito, forma et misure dello Inferno by Filippo Giunta, Florence, 1506.

The circles of Hell

Again, just a few examples of the cross sections of Hell to contrast with the scarce looking-straight-down-at-Hell image above.

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Art History — Iconography — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

The Invention of Satirical Photography (1840)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1911

“Nothing is falser than people’s preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality…”
(atribued to) Petronius,

The Satyricon

(Image source, Gerry Badger blog, who also has some interesting things to say about the work as momento mori.)

The road in determining who was the first person to what discovery is sometime a bit rocky–so with the invention of the computer (ask Mr. Atanatsoff), and the telephone (ditto Mr. Gray) and the television (and so to with Dr. Korn). This is also the case with photography, the rights for the discovery of the process contested in the first year following the announcement of the process.

The response to rejected claims for priority in discovery are almost (?) never recorded visually, but in he case of photography the rejected party did make a visual response, which I think was a prosimentrum of sorts, a photographic novella, and the appearance of the first use of satire in photography.

Louis Daguerre’s epochal publication in the Comptes Rendus in 1839 would bring about the general recognition of the birth of photography–his process was described in that article and was immediately set to use by hundreds of adventurers people even in the first few weeks after publication. IT may well be that there are legitimate claimants working on the “photogenic” science before this time but it is Mr. Daguerre who published his findings first.

Among the many “firsts” in the first year of photography (reckoned as PD or post Daguerre

[Source here.]

Generally though the first photographic portrait has been recognized as being the work of Robert Cornelius, who was among the earliest practioners of the new science of the Daguerreotype. This is his work, dated 1839, made in his father’s gas light importing business on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia:

(Both subjects have interesting hair issues.)

is is fine and remarkable, though the images simply record the bodies of the humans that are pictured. The first human portrait with an edge, with a political or social axe too grind and point to make, an image bent on a decisive end, belongs to a man who mildly and then hotly contested Daguerere’s claim to the birth of photography–Hippolyte Bayard.

Bayard (1807-1887) experimented in the photographic science before the publication of Daguerre’s paper and had shared some of his successes at this early date with members of the French Academy of Sciences (the publishers of the esteemed Comptes Rendus, the vehicle for Daguerre’s paper). He was even in communication with Francois Arago, who as it turns out was the champion of Daguerre, and who introduced the paper to the world. After the appearance of Daguerre’s paper Bayard–no doubt somewhat envious of the attention and money/funding that Daguerre was receiving) petitioned for help from Arago to establish his own claim and a chance for the experimenter’s lament (funding). He was told in no uncertain terms by Arago to cease the attention, as it would hurt the chances of Daguerre to establish his priority and have the honor of the invention of photography to stay in France. It is a longer story than this, obviously, but suffice to say, Bayard’s interests were mostly ignored, his priority claims relinquished. (He was later able to collect a few thousand francs for his scientific work, but the larger prizes eluded him.

And so in 1840, full of his own defeat and thoroughly impressed by Daguerre’s success, Bayard composed the (above) portrait of himself as a drowned and dead man. On the reverse he wote:

“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the
process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this
indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with
his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to
Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and
the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life….!
… He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has
recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along
for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the
face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.” (From Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Thames & Hudson, 1965)

It seems that the use of satire in photography was not common in the first few decades following 1839, which makes Bayard’s first use of he genre in 1840 even more remarkable. Satire in general has been aroudn for thousands of years, mostly in the form of drama and literature, and then in (Western, at least) painting in the Renaissance), right up through the Brueghels and Hogarth and Chaplin’s Great Dictator and Dr. Strangelove. But it seems to me that the first photographic use of the genre came with the overtaken Bayard, who at least deserves this honor of “firstness”.

Note:

I just wanted to remark on the hands and head of Bayard in his self-portrait–I believe that the man is just sunburned. It si common to see in 19th century photographs of working people that–when their hat is removed and so on–we see a big sun/tan line ont heir forehead. This is particularly the case in the work of Solomon Butcher, who recorded the lives of families on the SOdbuster Fronter in the 1880’s and 1890’s in Nebraska.

(Source, Nebraska State Historical Society.)

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Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Inventions — Photography, history

Zoomology: Dorothea Lange and the Rex Theatre for Colored People, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Zoomology Series

This is a short visit with one of Dorothea Lange’s (who I’ve written about several times on this blog, as in this case) interesting FSA photographs.

Leland, Miss., in the Delta area. The Rex theatre for Negro people

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Art History — Photography — Photography, history — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Zoomology

Light as a Weapon, Above and Below (1917)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Although electric lamps/searchlights have been militarily used on land and sea since the 1880’s (at least), it is still unusual to see light itself displayed as a weapon in a poster. This is especially true when the light is airborne and in real, in-potential-use applications. An earlier image appears in the Illustrated London News of a giant airship illuminating a battlefield, but it is a rather futuristic view of the employment of light as a weapon, and didn’t quite come about as an effective tool. (As much as the airship would illuminate of the opponent’s night-time position, it also made itself extraordinarily vulnerable–lighting up your enemy’s position just didn’t make for a practical idea, especially when the notions of bombing and night bombing came into being.)

In this first image below, there is a strong beam emanating from an aircraft in 1917–how it is generating such light, and whether it was conceivable to have it light enough to be on the aircraft, I don’t know.

Conversely, the searchlight coming from the military (battle-)ship could certainly have supported the machinery to produce any number of effort, though it seems again to be counter-productive, establishing itself as a not particularly fast-moving target to anything on the sea or above (or below) it.

On the other hand, this Swedish movie poster seems to have put the idea to good use (source, here):

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Art History — Militaria — Technology, History of

Massive 500-Poster Mosaic: the Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection, 1935-1943

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"Haiti" A drama of the black Napoleon by William Du Bois : With the New York cast.

Here’s another Massive Mosaic display (following up on a Massive 500-Daguerretotype display, here), this one utilizing (linked!) thumbnails from he Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection, located here.

The WPA was the Works Progress Administration, the largest of the New Deal agencies, and it was designed to give paid jobs to the millions of people who were out of work during the Great Depression. From 1935-1943 the WPA put some 8.5 million people to work in a vast social undertaking, distributing food and clothing, building houses, roads, bridges, parks and making enormous construction improvements to the national infrastructure. There was also an arts art to the project which employed many thousnads of artists, actors and writers in producing dramas, histories, guidebooks and other sorts of artistic projects, including the artwork for the posters advertising other WPA projects.

“During its 8-year history, the WPA built
651,087 miles of highways, roads, and streets; and constructed, repaired, or
improved 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks, and 853
airport landing fields.”–Indiana University’Lily Library, here.

During its lifetime the WPA spent about $12 billion, which worked out to be something like 4-6% of the GDP, annually. To put this in some perspective, that would be like taking the entire amount of money spent on the war on terror over the past 11 years and investing it all in caring for the poor and fixing bridges and building roads and so forth…I roundly reckon that figure to be about $8 trillion dollars that would have been spent on domestic issues rather than fighting wars This is about $80k/per capita, or $320k/family of four, which is somewhere around what the MacArthur folks receive–so basically the war money is the sly equivalent of a Genius Award granted to each and every family.

Historical GDP numbers, here, from

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Art — Art History — Information, Quantitative Display of

Reference Tool: Your Handy Guide to U.S. Patent Numbers

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is a simple tally of American patent numbers and the years in which they appeared. I’ve found this list handy from time to time and thought to repost it here. It is a lot easier to have this series posted here than have to wrangle he data out of the occasionally labyrinthine U.S.P.T.O.:

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Art History — Perception — Perspective — Reference Tools

The Devil’s (Gun) in the Detail (1489)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

When I went to research this phrase, above, I was surprised to learn that it is about half as old as I. Playing on a slightly older expression, “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail” (the good God is in the detail), commonly attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), and of course “God in in the detail/s”, the “devil” part seems to be only from the mid/late 1970’s–a surprise.

Nevertheless, we are still left with a surprise in this devilish detail from the incunabulum of St. Augustus, De civitate dei….(this printed in Basel by Johann Amerbach on 13 February 1489). It shows it in its two panel woodcut the illustrious saint at top, working away at his desk; and at the bottom a battle between the cities of Babylon (founded by Abel) and Zion (“Syon”, by Cain). In this battle Zion is defended by devils, and the devils are armed.

The angels of Babylon appear sympathetic but unresponsive to the devil-play, while an angel at top left seems to be blessing its devil enemy who seems to be scaring/screaming at her. In any event this is a lovely and complex image coming in the fourth decade of moveable type printing.

Now: regarding Zion and Augustine, I really don’t know why the writer is putting devils in charge of the defense of “the city of the living god”. The many-times-mentioned Zion of the Old Testament, “…Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth” (Psalms 50:2), doesn’t seem to be calling for devils. But then I don’t know this history of Jerusalem during the Byzantine period, 4th/5th century. So far as wars and savages launched against Jerusalem, it was destroyed twice, attacked 52 times, captured/recaptured 44 times, and beseiged 23 times–perhaps this representation wasn’t too terribly much out of the ordinary.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Art History — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at

Henry Darger and Campbell Soups Kids Playtime Schoolroom, 1955

JF Ptak Science Books Continuing Post 1081 from 2010

Somewhere in the past I got the idea that the defining icon and supremely outsider-y artist, Henry Darger¹, lived his life twice. One life he
spent with the other people in his job as a quiet janitor; the other life he spent re-enacting his day in miniature, a
diorama of his workplace and his own
apartment, reviewing his conversations real and supposed, revisiting shared-or-not visual clues, altering the day as it progressed with the possibilities of the actions-not-taken.

Maybe it is just this unshakable self-created image that colors the association of the Campbell Kids’ Miniature Play School Room that makes it seem so dark and dangerous, especially since we now what is going to happen to the little girls in Darger’s red-tinged lexi-necessary art world. Here’s a molecular-level example of Darger’s fantastic output, featuring his Vivian Girls:

(The picture at the lef is Miss Elsie Paroubek, a 5-year-old girl murdered in Chicago in 1911 and who may have been the sympathetic impetus for Darger’s life work.)

And this is really just a child’s toy–a delightful one, too, filled with details of the school day: movable desks, toy books, bouncey pony tails, and a teacher speaking at the back of the heads of the kids. (He’s also carrying a stick by the way; maybe its just a pointer.)

I suspect that the disturbed nature of this toy lives just in my head with its created Darger visions or repetitive living. Or maybe not–it does looked inescapably creepy, complete with a child in dunce’s hat.

Notes:

1. Henry Darger, 1892-1973, living form the Chicago World’s Fair to Watergate, posthumously became perhaps the recognized standard model for outsider art, his magnum opus a 15,000 page and hyper-illustrated work The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the
Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child
Slave Rebellion being the base of the interest. It has its own magnificence to be sure, and I can instantly recognize the enormous effort and creativity, but I always come back to the redded-up girl’s sexual organ additions, which are naturally upsetting, making the whole of the affair feel like a monstrous mental health porn. And for as long as I’ve known about him, and which is also wholly
unsupported by fact or reasonable supposition, I pictured Darger returning to his rooms at
night after a day of cleaning, mopping, scrubbing, taking abuse for
spills not cleaned, and then reliving the entire day at night in
miniature. In my own story, Darger created small figurines and puppets
through which he re-enacted his day, complete with sets of the rooms in
which he worked. Perhaps he lost himself in these moments, finding a
vindication in miniature stages in his second-story walk-up that he
couldn’t in his daily life, allowing his creative, 20-million-word
nighttime imagination to open up. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I made this imaginary life up.

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Category: Art History