Category: Perspective

The Solids in Bellini (?) Is the Blankness a Heritage of Uccello or Bartleby?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1943 (Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

“Where is abstract without solids, I ask you?” — William Gaddis, on the solids in Uccello, The Recognitions, 1955

Actually, I think that there’s plenty of abstract without solids, so long as you’ve seen solids before.

I’ve returned to a slightly recurrent theme in this blog dealing with the great Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) and his study of perspective–but most directly as he was observed by William Gaddis in his Great American Novel The Recognitions. (I am forever grateful to my brilliant Patti Digh for really hooking me into Gaddis so many years ago–Patti was long intrigued by Gaddis and wrote her UVa master dissertation on his Big Book. Gaddis’ book can be found here.) Among other things Uccello is recognized as being one of the greatest and among the earliest artist to re-discover the science of perspective, and was throughout his life a passionate student and practioner.

[Much of Uccello’s work can be found at Paolo Uccello Complete Works website, here.]

“Painting is exquisite as the punishment for the thinker.”–William Gaddis, The Recognitions

The “solids’ recognized by Gaddis (and not really
discussed, and mentioned only twice in the book I believe) are incredible to me. Looking at his painting Battle of San Romano
(1457) we see Perspective in her place; but when we look at, say, the rumps
of the horses, we see almost no detail, just a mass of color, a solid,
with spectacular plainness. What in the world was he thinking? He could
certainly have painted the horse and the other solids with texture and
detail, but he didn’t, and to me it seems antithetical to the painting.
What in the name of all motherly things was he thinking? And who else
on earth was using such huge amounts of plain solids in their
paintings? I’m not aware that anyone else was, and I am relatively
clueless as to why he did it, abandoning detail in order to raise awareness of the surrounding parts of the painting, or perhaps heightening a sense of the not-yet-existent abstract, or drawing attention to the perspectival aspect of the work?

[A detail of the missing detail, above.]

But the solids are not just limited to Uccello, though they may have appeared there first, especially as the “exhibited” variety of this thinking. Jacopo Bellini (ca. 1400-ca. 1470) was a contemporary, living pretty much during the same period of time as Uccello, and who was responsible as much as anyone else for introducing oils in painting and establishing the Venetian style. He was a brilliant artist, the teacher of Mantegna, ran a fabulous studio, and was the father of two great artists. (One son, Giovanni, was a highly regarded artist who was also the teacher of Girgione and Titian.)

In looking through two volumes of Jacopo’s drawings, I was struck by the number of times that horses and other objects appeared without detail, as solid solids, or mostly solid, quite outside the way in which these things were painted in the 15th century. Pacing though the books flipping through the open pages is like looking at a pop-up book in reverse–each set of pages opened are like looking into, looking through, the book, into space. They are collections of perspective. And they are populated by those other solids, which was surprising.

His horses appear very much like those in Uccello–except of course that these images were personal, workbooks for the artist, idea-machines and memory devices. There was plenty of detail in other aspects of these drawings, but the lack of the detail int he Uccellian manner really struck me.

Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier’s “Jacopo Bellini’s Interest in Perspective and its Iconographical Significance” found in Zeitschrift fuer Kunstgeschichte (1975)
makes a very learned and eloquent case for the overwhelming interest
that Belinni had in the study of perspective–not to the exclusion of
all other things, because there were still patrons to be satisfied and
religious and triumphal scenes that needed to be painted–and
concentrated on that interpretation focusing on Bellini’s stylebooks.
(Most of Bellini’s output has been lost, but there are two volumes of
manuscript studies that have survived.)

“Though
many of Jacopo Bellini’s drawings are reminiscent of model-book notions
in that they illustrate a variety of suggestions for the representation
of traditional themes – for example Flagellations, Adorations, Davids,
and animals -they are, taken as a whole, entirely different from model
book drawings. Jacopo rarely concentrated on a subject for the sake of
its thematic content. Almost never does a bald statement of fact appear
to describe, for example, a biblical event. Rather than focusing on the
event itself, Jacopo’s compositions characteristically are concerned
with other things. In the vast majority of cases the subject is set
within the context of a variety of architectural motifs or in that of an
extensive naturalistic world. It would appear that for Jacopo Bellini
biblical subject matter was a justification for his participation in a
variety of other new interests. Primary among these was the special
attention given to perspective…”

No mention of course of the Uccello horses. And perhaps they’re really not there there, but it certainly looks like they are, at least to me. They might not have been there for Gaddis, either, as Bellini doesn’t show up in the book, Gaddis thinking more about Uccello, and then even more so of Hieronymous Bosch, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling.

And here it is, Bellini’s solids, an example:

There are others as well, examples of what, I am not sure–fantastic visions into blankness and into the future of what painting would become 450 years hence.

Perhaps they were just place-keepers, to be filled-in as neededm just a shrt-hand expression of a horse rather than a transcendental imperative. After all, Bellini knew horse muscles, and decided in his workbooks that he just didn’t need to draw them, or that in the sense of Bartleby the scrivener that he’d prefer not to.

Notes:

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The Most Beautiful Perspective Drawings of the Baroque?

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The fantastic Jesuit Andrea Pozzo published results of his researches on perspective in his Perspectiva pictorum et architectoru (1693),
explaining how he was able to compellingly, unbelievably represent
three-dimensional images on two-dimensional spaces, this image showing
plan and projection and profile, effectively giving you a
three-dimensional cross section of the architectural element…and having them seemingly float in space. His work is just absolutely gorgeous.

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Marble Clouds and their Emotional Shadows: Cloud Geometries in Art
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1942 (Part I)
```
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph 
	And out of the caverns of rain..  Percy B. Shelley, "The Cloud", 1820
```
[John Ruskin, Cloud Perspectival, 1860. Source for all Ruskin images: “Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible”,
by Mary Jacobus, here.]

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was still a very young man when he published the start of a series of works in art criticism, Modern Painters, in 1843¹. To refer to it as a great work in critical theory is painting the work with a narrow brush, though–it had a very sweeping overall effect, and addressed all manner of issues integral to art, and was a developing vision of what art was looking at in the 19th century. Ostensibly it began as a defense of the work of J.M.W. Turner and the way in which that man represented nature in his pre-Impressionist, pre-Expressionist work. Ruskin makes the case that the works that were so grating part of the art world i the 1830’s were highly consistent with centuries of representing nature in art–and not only that, but presenting evidence that turner did so like no other artist in history. Ruskin would weave further volumes of Modern Painters through the body of his other work for the next 17 years, publishing the last installment in a fifth volume in 1860.

Turner (1775-1851) was a great Romantic and a lot of that work tends towards a very full and very early expression of Impressionism and Expressionism, something that not everyone was ready for in the first quarter of the 19th century. This is particularly so in his paintings of clouds, and even more so in cloud/ocean interaction. They are sweeping and breath-taking and very emotional works, in some ways like the late string quartets of Beethoven–powerful, provocative, internal dialogs of the deep power of nature. He must stand with John Constable as the Cloud Man of the 19th Century, or perhaps Constable stands with him. They both in a way stand with Luke Howard, the scientist who was really the first classifier of clouds–an undertaking which in some impossible way escaped the recognition of the greatest classifiers it he history of science–and who did so in a paper in 1802, written at a time when Constable and Turner were both young artists.

Turner and Constable both painted clouds like perhaps no others before them; and Ruskin, in his deep appreciation for the importance of the representation of nature int he art, also made a contribution to the understanding of clouds that was of an extraordinary nature. In the fifth volume of his Modern Painters Ruskin attempts a perspective study of clouds, and may have been about the first to do so. The illustrations of this effort I think are incredible, and remind me very much of installing a sort of rigidity to clouds, a cloud geometry, veritable studies of stones and blocks in the sky. The imaging part of this exercise must have been an enormous thing back there in 1860, to think of clouds in a perspectival way, floating very large geometric objects in the sky. The astonishing results are seen (above) and following:

And this:

[John Ruskin, Cloud Perspective: Curvilinear., Modern Painters, Vol. V, Plate LXV.]

In a way the first image reminds me of Andrea Pozzo’s work in his monumental Rules and
examples of perspective proper for painters and architects (1693):

but really more in the way that Pozzo’s work seems to be elevated and floating in a heavy perspectivist space, bigger and blockier sky-borne marble than with ruskin. But still, the disembodied floatiness of the Pozzo work is ethereal.

Ruskin does round out his blocky and beautiful geometry, which definitely reminds me of work w=that would appear 90 years later: Ruskin, again:

And Georgia O’Keefe’s Clouds III (1963), though her clouds tend towards a more rigid geometry in Clouds IV (1965, following):

O’Keefe, Clouds Above the Sky III, 1963

O’Keefe, Clouds Above the Sky IV, 1965

Ms. Georgia is definitely seeing her clouds with different eyes than Ruskin, and they are entirely different creatures–but still, the two come together in my head as relatives. The clouds, I mean.

I started looking around for early hard-line cloud geometries and thus far I haven’t found very much, though there is a tremendous example by Henry Van de Velde’s (1863-1957) “Sun at Ocean (Rhythmic Synthesis”) which I found in Werner Hoffman’s Turning Points in Twentieth century Art, 1890-1917 and which was executed in 1888/9, looks to me to be absolutely incredible for its time, a nearly non-representational, proto-abstract something, done three decades before these genres came into being.

I don;t know where the designer Van de Velde fits in the early history of non-representational art, but his effort in the second to last decade of the 19th century certainly seems to be very unusual for its time, and a good example of creative cloud representation.

Non-standard cloud imagery is much easier to finding the 20th century, like those of Georges Braque in his La Ciotat Harbor (1906):

Even this starts to have the look of something earlier, particularly if you turned the clouds-in-art clock way back, say, into the Renaissance. For example Martin Schoengauer‘s spectacular The Temptation of St. Anthony, which was printed in 1470/5, has
a beautiful, fluid circularity to it, full of an earthy roundness even
as the saint is pursued by demons. But the sky in the background is
populated with nothing but dashes to suggest clouds, and which also starts to look something like the Fauvist and Expressionist works to come, 400/500 years later.

(There are many examples of the sky being simply not represented at all, particularly in woodblock,

like this image from Ovid (Accipe Studiose Lector P. Ouidij Metamorphosin...printed in Venice in 1509:

“You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly”.–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

There are many non-sky images like this.

Another interesting modern example is this Paul Klee (though it comes fairly late in that career, in 1940):

And an example from the ubiquitous Picasso, still later, in 1962:

But earlier images are harder to locate. The obvious early-ish source (though still much later in the century) would be Van Gogh (say, with Starry Night) and Monet, though the fractalesque Van Gogh gets much closer to the re-interperative power of the Ruskin images than the reflected impressionist beauty of the Monet.

On a cursory look around the antiquarian painterly sky-world, it is becoming obvious that the cloud geometries of Ruskin are very uncommon.

Notes

1. For full text of Ruskin’s Modern Painters , see (1873)volume 5 for (1860) and (1873)
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What the Eye of God Sees: Gassendi’s Vision, 1658

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1938

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) published this God’s-eye-view of creation a few years after his death in the fourth volume (Astronomica) of his six-volume Opera Omina. His friends and supporters of course saw to the publication of this mathematician/philosopher/logician’s work¹back there in 1658, so Gassendi–a very prominent thinker from a long-line of thinkers nearly on the verge of great discovery here and there and certainly a witness to it–made his greatest adventure in publishing only in death.

Imaging a physical god is a tricky business in the history of the printed book. Bits of the creator of the universe turn up in book illustrations over hundreds of years, though I am not sure when the very first picture of a part of god appears. The hand of the creator (generally seen as the Primum Mobile) is not terribly uncommon in images of a scientific nature in the 17th and 18th centuries, and is perhaps best exemplified by Robert Fludd’s famous Monochord:

Of course there are many instance of the full-bodied god being seen through a break in the clouds, though in all the instances of this that I have seen the tantalizing peak into whatever region it is that this god exists is left entirely blank, a small white space. As so:

(Title page is for the narrative poem Le Metamorfosi, Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
translated into Italian by Gioseppe Horologgi, and published in Venice in 1563. See an earlier post on this blog, A History of Blank and Empty Things: God in a Hole in the Sky, here.)

The eye of god is also not very uncommon, and is represented by an eye and also in a sacred triangle. Less common though are images like Gassendi’s, which in a way, in an odd and almost offhand way, give the reader a sense of what it is that god might be seeing in agodly-lineof-sight Perhaps this is incorrect–but in judging his image with others in my experience it seems to me that the representation is a little more “personalized” here than just about anywhere else.

Notes:

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On Being Obvious, (Again)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The following example of Great Obviousness comes from one of the great masters of perspective on the Continent, Jan Vredeman de Vries, (architect, engineer and man with a vision), and appear in his work Variae Architecturae Formae, and published in 1601. (The whole of the book is available at the Internet Archive, here.)

It would be interesting to know the history of this tree and its obvious salvation–it doesn’t seem to be older than the street or the buildings, yet, there it is, a tree the diameter of an adult waist in the middle of a very populated street

Below you can see the detail of the man at the middle right–he is absolutely pointing to teh tree, perhaps sharing his amazement with the man and child coming down the street. The pointer had been seated, probably, on the bench behind the bar that was in front of the bar/saloon/draughthouse that he was probably inside of, perhaps enjoying a pint of five, perhaps making the tree even more amusing than it was. (The tilted stein is clearly visible advertising a place for thirsts to stop.) The child is reacting to something, and even so the dogs–the second of which seems to be stopped mid-stride in amazement.

Another exzmple of the unexpected tree comes later in the same book, when we see one tree in th emiddle of a plan garden and the other growing on top of what might be an herbarium. (On closer inspection the figure at lower right is a woman collectig some water in a jug; without magnification the seen looks a little more sinister than it is.)

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The Theatre of the Infinite Horizon

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1937

I am hardly an historian of the theatre (and having said that will give me a chance to make some mistakes in what I am about to say) but so many of the stage designs of Giacomo Torelli look to be concentrated at an infinite horizon that I wanted to collect a few of them in one place. Torelli (1608-1678) was an artist and artistic-technician who brought engineering skills to the stage, and was evidently a much-sought-after designer, given his very special

[Image source: WIki, here.] Set design for Act 5 of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède as first performed on 1 February 1650 by the Troupe Royale at the Petit-Bourbon in Paris.]

I do have to say that the Torelli puts me in mind of the perspective king of 17th c Continental architecture, Vriedman de Vries (1527 – c. 1607), especially with the columns (from his Architectura, 1633):

[Source: Swaen.com]

talents and innovations. He was absolutely interested in one-point perspective and the techniques used to gather the audience’s vision and suck it all into the low-center of the back of the stage, giving the production a fabulous quality of depth and distance. (He also provided the ingenuity and gearwork for quick changes of massive scenery by one stagehand, working under the stage with pulleys and winches, hauling large elements on and off stage during a performance. His work can be seen in the iconic Encyclopedie of Denis Diderot in a section for “Machines du theatre” in 1772.)

The other thing that strikes me immediately with these images is their absolute usefulness in toy paper theatre. By making eight copies of the first image (above) and by cutting out each seven layers of columns (the opening space between the two sides becoming progressively smaller), and then the last and eight level of the mansion in the background and then standing them up and placing them all-in-a-row with an inch between them (accordion style), one could make a lovely 3-dimensional miniature stage. (Scene changes would be an entirely different matter.)

[Source: see note #1, below]

[Source: Copia-di-Arte.com, here.]

[Source: Publishing.cdlib.org, Operain Seventeenth Century Venice, the Creation of a Genre, by Ellen Rosand.]

[Francesco Buti/Isaac de Benserade, “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis”; Source: Oesterreichisches Theatre Museum, here]

Notes:

1. Bryan, Michael| (1889). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. Volume II : L-Z,
new edition, revised and enlarged, edited by Walter Armstrong &
Robert Edmund Graves. Covent Garden, London: George Bell and Sons

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The Visual Genetics of Color and an Unintentional Pre-Modernist Masterpiece

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1282–continued, & now with the Full Text book!

[Earlier in this blog, about 1200 posts ago, a million words ago, I wrote about an extraordinary book by an aesthetician named Emily Vanderpoel. It is “extraordinary” in a narrower sense, and that “extraordinary” might not actually be positive for its original intent. The extra-intent of the book, what has come out of it for me, was something that was unintentionally accomplished by the author. The images that she used to illustrate her color theory ideas–the basis of which are not really comprehensible to me–turn out to be artwork in themselves, a found art, the artistry of the images taking over the original intention for the arrangement of their color. I’ve found the book now at the Internet Archive in all of its glory, and downloaded only 150 times. I’m still at a loss to know why this work hasn’t received more attention

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever.

The full text is available HERE via Internet Archive.

Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions. Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years. People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-imagine Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination. I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.

I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique for it time perhaps. Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform. But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it.

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental.

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10×10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100. Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious. I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal. Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts. In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world. I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.

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Inside Looking Out, Part II: From Inside the Eye, Nostril and NYC.

JF Ptak Science Books [Extending Post 1813]

I cannot think of another illustration by a scientist or philosopher who attempts to explain their own, literal, view of the world and then offer what this looks like to the reader from inside his own head, looking out through his own eye. That’s exactly what Ernst Mach is doing right here on page 15 of his influential book Die Analyse der Empfindungen, the fourth German edition (“The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical”, published in Jena in 1903).

There is nothing in this world for Mach that is not admissible to the human brain that is not empirically verifiable–that is, the world is nothing but awash in sensation and that sensation itself forms part of the experience of, well, experience. I’ve actually never been interested in the philosophy of science, and this is one of the reasons why. Nevertheless I boldly break through my own prejudices to enjoy this phenomenally original image, drawn from the inside of Mach’s working mind, looking out through his eye socket, over his mustache, under his eyebrow, around his nose, out across his body and then leaping into the rest of the world. I think he does make his point about the essential.

Another interesting perspective is achieved by the one-and-only Fritz Kahn in 1926 with his imagery of viewing the world from deep within a human nostril.

This is a different sort of interpretation (from his Das Leben des Menschen/”The Life of Man”, printed in Stuttgart in 1931, volume 5, and found at the National Library of Medicine site section “Dream Anatomies” here https://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy/da_g_IV-A-06.html) from the Machian view, Dr. Kahn’s (1888-1968, a gynecologist and a renowned popular science communicator) being more of a landscape with the solar apogee of the nostril opening to the outside world.

And similar in a way to the Mach’s internal view of the outside world is this classic Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon of the world view of the New Yorker (and of course this includes only Manhattan). I know some number of people who have transposed their bodies much like Herr Mach into the Steinberg map–except that their worldview ends basically at the Hudson River (Mach’s feet) with the rest of the world being the sliver out there beyond the river (Mach’s window) until you go 359 degrees around the world to get back to the East River (and back inside Mach’s noggin). It is an unusual world view to have, but someone has to have it so that we can at least identify it so.

I just like the picture.

Notes

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Roentgen, Marey, & Malevich on the Edge of Modernity

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1924

The 1895/1896 issues of Nature magazine are compliantly normal until the first weeks of
1896 when the first of a flood of articles is published about the astonishing discovery of 50-year-old Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. The English-language popular science journal announcement of his December 28, 1895 “Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen” (“On a New Type of Ray”), appeared on 16 January 1896, and began the introduction of a new state of human experience. Roentgen’s experiments—built upon the work of J. Plucker (1801-1868), J. W. Hittorf (1824-1914), C. F. Varley (1828-1883), E. Goldstein (1850-1931), Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), H. Hertz (1857-1894) and the odious Phil Lenard (1862-1947)—revealed as much to humans as did the experiments and inventions of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek on the invisible worlds revealed by the microscope. There are more than 150 articles on the Roentgen (and soon to be “X-“) Ray, all published within 12 months of the original announcement, almost all excitedly, trying to comprehend, elucidate, expand, verify, this new world.

[The news of the discovery is first and most popularly reported in the January 6, 1896 London Standard: “The noise of war’s alarm should not distract attention from the marvelous triumph of science which is reported from Vienna. It is announced that Professor Routgen (sic) of the Wurzburg University has discovered a light which for the purpose
of photography will penetrate wood, flesh, cloth, and most other organic substances. The Professor has succeeded in photographing metal weights which were in a closed wooden case, also a man’s hand which showed only the bones, the flesh being invisible”. By the end of the month the news was completely absorbed, worldwide.]

I looked at the advertising in these issues (my copies of Nature for these decades generally have the original paper wrappers for the weeklies, complete with ad copy), looking for the first time that a Roentgen machine was offered for sale to the general public. As it turns out, they popped up 12 March 1896 (once), 19 March (twice), and then about once a week for the rest of the year. A little surprising, I think, a little light to my Monday-morning quarterback’s eye—I expected more; bigger, more, splashier. But the ads are small and sedate, hardly similar to the discovery they represent.

The rest of the world, the rest of the advertising world, stayed the same–the Roentgen discovery and the enormous possibilities and promises of his “new photography” lived in their own unique sphere, unencumbered by their sassy new brother. This mild response seems dimmer still when you compare it to that which greeted other (relatively) simple but still major advancements in the world of photography. Take for example Etienne Marey, who was a technoid and physician who was able to capture motion of all sorts–he was able to develop a picture so to speak of the movement of blood in the body via his instrument to calculate blood pressure, and he also created a shotgun-style camera that made the
world’s first high-speed photographs of movement. And so it cane to pass that in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s people were instantly able to see what a horse looked like when it galloped or what the body did *exactly* when jumping over a chair. When you couple this with fourth-dimension material one wonders why it took several more decades to bump into these images in the art of 1907+.

(Duchamp Nude Descending series, 1915; above, Marey, 1881)

And what indeed was normal in these pages? Magic lanterns
and magi lantern slides appear
at all levels; the gorgeous Wimshurst machine gets heavily advertised; the redoubtable Negretti & Zambra advertised all manner of excellent scientific instruments (biographs, thermogrphs. Nadeer Bros. advertised a pretty standard cell, and the ancient Crossley displayed their “new” oil engines, “suitable for all classes of agricultural work”. J.H. Stewart was selling their semi-automatic electric arc lamp, while across the page was Newton & Company’s “Newtonian” arc lamps for lanterns (“self feeding and focus keeping”). Microscopes and prepared slides abound, and Thomas Bolton advertises discretely and effectively for their “living specimens for the microscope”.

The Physical Review, the American upstart in the science world advertises that its third volume was available, while its distant cousin, the Psychological Review, advertised its own third volume. Booksellers seem to take the most space, thank goodness.

There are a few medical throwbacks: Epp’s Cocaine takes out occasional tenth-page ads for their “cocoa-nib extract, tea-like” selling its ‘gentile nerve stimulant”. Right underneath is “Holloway’s Pills”, promising to cure biliousness, sick headache, indigestion, and all (?!) internal complaints. These are brilliant simple samples of the skeleton of science in world-dominant Great Britain, in a world dominated at that time by H.A, Lorentz, Ernst Mach , Roentgen, Korteweg, de Vries, Bateson, Jean-Baptiste Perrin, Pierre Curie, Zeeman, Becquerel, Joseph Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Marconi, Ramsay, Fitzgerald. And so on.

Nothing offered for sale here offered any significant clue to the pregnant world of modernity that was nearly
there—the world would become ‘modern” almost immediately following Roentgen, with revolutionary, epochal changes in art (in non-representational form more so than Impressionism), theater, literature, music. Just about everything changed (except politics). But there is no hint to paradigm shift hidden in the ads, just as they were with the machines selling the promise of Roentgen’s “new photography. There’s something about the fine glass, superb turning of the screw, and a perfectly oiled gear though that makes this sort of perfection seem so lonely in the world of larger change. Bertha, Roentgen’s wife, sat for 15 minutes while her husband passed his rays through her hand; she ran from the room once she saw the results, revealing her very bones and no doubt a strong sense of the
fragility of life, and the strong presence of death. Many had the same reaction to the Kandinsky’s
shapes and Malevich’s white circles and red rectangles and Ibsen’s drama and Einstein’s dancing dust and the rogue syncopation of jazz. It is probably a very natural reaction to try and protect established memory—but memory should be more flexible than that, I think, to keep a healthy mind.

(Malevich’s 8 Red Triangles, 1915)

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JF Ptak

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Anticipation, History of — Perception — Perspective
Zoomology: Beautiful Ruination at the Beginning of Photography

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is a continuation of sort of this morning’s post, “Massive 500-Daguerreotype Mosaic“, though this one concentrates on the sumptuous ruination and decay that has occurred within and to some of these photographic images. I’ve looked closely at only five of these images, and within each of these five images there are five more. And, if you manipulated the largest downloadable file of these (which range up to about 150 megs), there are five more within the five within the five. And all that before you start to imagine the artistic fantasies int he non-representational forms, and that before adding color. So five is all that will be here, for the present.

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JF Ptak

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Perception — Perspective — Photography — Photography, history — Zoomology

Category: Perspective

[Francesco Buti/Isaac de Benserade, “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis”; Source: Oesterreichisches Theatre Museum, here]