Category: Prints–looking HARD/deeply at

What Pictures Tell Us: Medieval Treatment of Women in a Renaissance World

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There are all sorts of famous seats: seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there’s the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain’s chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum). The seat pictured at left, though, is anonymous and lonely, but it is full of a story.

Sometimes one discrete, odd image can tell you a lot of history or the story of its time: It might seem simple and benign, but once you stop to think about it just little, an entirely different story can emerge. Take for example this woodcut from Jacob Rueff’s De conceptu et generatione hominis, et iis quae circa haeac potyissimum consuderantur (in six books), published in Zurich by Christoph Froschauer in 1554. It looks like it might be a seat straight out of an old WC, but it is actually a birthing chair. And it doesn’t look particularly inviting (or not threatening) for the tasks to come; and such was the state-
of-the-art of birthing children in 1554. Well, earlier than that, really, because Rueff’s work was an improved version of a still earlier work by Rosslin (Der swangern frauen). I look at this chair/seat, and I think, “oh dear god”, even with an historian’s sensibilities, knowing full well that it hadn’t been changed much for hundreds of years prior to this publication. There’s quite a bit in this book’s 66 illustration to excite the historian of medicine, some of which are rather beautiful and demanding, like this astrological representation of anatomy (at right). But it is still the chair in all of these pictures that is the most powerful to me. When all of the medical advancements and distractions were boiled away, and the discussion of the two types of foreceps was eliminated, it all came down to a woman in an uncomfortable, stiff-backed straight-up chair. A chair with no cushion or throw or anything of any sort for the comfort of the woman, though there was an extensive dust ruffle flanking it. And as great as the advancements were in medicine in the first part of the 16th century, dealing with women in labor was still a Medieval practice.

I should also point out that the Rueff book, as old as it was, was reprinted, translated, into English with many of its ideas riding out time intact, published in London eight decades later. The chair was still there.

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Baroque X-Ray of the Soul: Jacob Boehme’s “Psychologia”, 1632

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This solar-systemesque plan of the human soul appeared in Johannes Werdenhagen’s translation of the expansive Jakob Boehme’s Psychologia [graece] vera I[oanni] B[oemi] T[eutonici] XL quaestionibus explicata, printed in Amsterdam in 1632. Boehme’s (1575-1624) original work waited for 8 years following his death to appear in print in any form, fearing during his lifetime that perhaps some retribution for his barrier bending work might find him–and it turns out to have been true, as this book (and the only one of Boehme’s subsequently published works) made its way onto the Roman Index in 1633. Boehme was a mystical panthesist and psychic who blended the Kabbbalah, Valentin Weigel, Paracelsus and the Bible in doses wide and narrow, finding his own advanced-Lutheran voice in works concerned with sin, evil and redemption, populated with angels and grace and on and on, in a world view far-reaching and way to complex to go into here.

Part of that philosophy is displayed in this map of the soul, found in Psychologia–it would’ve been fairly impenetrable to me had I not found an English translation (below) of the image, published in Forty Questions Concerning the Soule in 1655.

I thought that I was going to try to make a summary of the map, but, honestly, it is too just involved and intertwined and complex to do this quickly, so I’ll just let whoever cares to have a go at it under their own steam. I will point out that the major geographical feature here is the cross at center, which is actually Christ’s crucifix and the great delineator of the system of the soul. But this is a gross simplification of the work of an unschooled man who rose to be a cobbler before compiling his remarkable set of ideas. I’ve included a few explanations of the 63 items incorporated in the map–it is a difficult go, particularly since this was part of only the first of the forty questions addressed in the book.

*Another example of Boehme’s style of writing:
“For he that will say, I have a Will, and would willingly do Good,
but the earthly Flesh which I carry about me, keepeth me back, so that
I cannot; yet I shall be saved by Grace, for the Merits of Christ. I
comfort myself with his Merit and Sufferings; who will receive me of
mere Grace, without any Merits of my own, and forgive me my Sins.
Such a one, I say, is like a Man that knoweth what Food is good for his
Health, yet will not eat of it, but eateth Poison instead thereof, from
whence Sickness and Death, will certainly follow

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Emerging Oddness in Durer: the first bookbag (?) and a lonely dot (for the History of Dots)

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It seems a little sinful to be looking so closely at the great Albrecht Durer for such trifles, but, well, my eye fell on these micro-notes, and won’t let them go. Using “emerging” as a verb, what comes floating up to me from the minor realm in the Michelfeldt Tapestry, a woodblock illustration completed across three sheets, is the middle figure in sheet three. He stands, a plumpy measure of a man, between two figures with balloon legends floating above them. The first figure is a priest or scholar whose ballooned sentiment translates to something like “Lord, we are listening to your oration, we crave to attend your school”; the second figure with balloon thoughts is much more interesting to me, this one reading “Everything that goes out now re-enters the source from which it flowed”, a good circular bit coming from the head of a man with starshine eyes. These two people deliver some pretty weighty observations, but I’m distracted more by the middle-man, who happens to be carrying a book in a sack. What’s the book doing in a silken purse? I must say I’ve never noticed a book in a bag in the renaissance before this–maybe they’re all over the place, but I’m guessing not, otherwise this guy wouldn’t’ve made such a strong impression on me.

Second is this woodcut of a witch riding a wolf (appearing in Ultricus Molitor’s Von den Unholden oder Hexen, printed in 1491)–it catches my attention not for the wonderfully flowing robe, or the fact that women riding anything at this point in the Renaissance* was not common, but the small dot right under the wolf. What is the dot doing there? Why not just leave the foreground a blank, like the sky? I don’t know why I’m so distracted by this thing, but I am. And while I’m at it, that landscape in the background is pretty unusual, too: what is that squiggly bit to the right of the witch?

*Witches riding animals, even in the further work of Durer, comes much more into play int he first quarter of the 16th century. See also the work of Aldorfer, Schauffelein, Grien and others.

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Pre-modern Advanced Technologies and Looking at the History of the Future

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Future (Definition) That period of time in which our affairs prosper,
our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dicitonary

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.” E.A. Poe

Looking “into” what the future might hold is a nasty business suited for hairshirts, geniuses and fools–except of course to say that there will be what would seem to us to be shock and awesome display that will wash over future generations like the shock of Darwin washing over those in the 1870’s.* Looking into the past of looking into the future is far more approachable but not necessarily “easy”. The major difficulty in finding the future amidst all the historical majors and minors is that given the optical distortions in the broadening of our depth of field to our WayBack Vision. It is harder to see things that are out-of-place to a given time given our familiarity with it.

(Neil R. Jones (1909-1988), a relatively obscure scifi writer, seems to be the first to introduce the concept of a history of the future in his Amazing Stories article of July 1930 called “The Jameson Satellite”. (It is interesting to note that at about the same time he also introduced the word “astronaut”, and, further into the decade introduced some of the first appearances of cyborg/robotic story characters.))

The idea of identifying these parts of future history is certainly easier when they identify themselves so, as seen in the caption of this wonderful you-are-there image of a person flying in an aeroplane over the Eiffel tower, and printed in the redoubtable Illustrated London News for 1909. The writer leaves himself plenty of wiggle room, though still firmly convinced that even though flying was still in its relative infancy in Europe, the time would certainly come when people would flit about it planes simply to see great wonders.

Images of at the edges of contemporary technical capabilities and whose skill hints at bigger things to come are trickier to see. Take for example the following engraving found in the Encyclpoedie methodique*, published in Paris from 1782 to 1830. This engraving depicts a ship of the line in an unusual perspective, best suited I think to show th eshape of the hulol, and looking to me extremely similar to a computer-generated graphic.

Also, the fantasitically articulated and probably unworkable set of metalic artificial limbs was another peep into the future–I think that the technology necessary for these limbs to be anything close to operational just escaped its manufacturer when they were designed in the 1760’s.

In any event the exercise of finding the future in contmeporary writings of the past is interesting and fruitful, and really does make you pay attention to your sense of history and what modern prejudices one brings to it.

*”We may expect that a series of shocks of the type of Darwinism will
be given to established opinions on all sorts of subjects. One cannot
suggest in detail what these shocks will be, but since the opinions on
which they will impinge are deep-seated and irrational, they will come
upon us and our descendants with the same air of presumption and
indecency with which the view that we are descended from monkeys came
to our grandfathers. ..
JBS Haldane, “Daedalus, or Science and the Future

** The L’Encyclopédie méthodique ou par ordre de matières par une société
de gens de lettres, de savants et d’artistes; précédée d’un Vocabulaire
universel, servant de Table pour tout l’Ouvrage, ornée des Portraits de
MM. Diderot et d’Alembert, premiers Éditeurs de l’Encyclopédie appeared in over 200 volumes, and was a version of the famous Diderot encyclopedia,m though expanded, and ordering its iformation according to subject area rather than alphabetically.

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Blank and Empty Things: Disembodied Celestial Hands and Arms, Part 3.

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This wonderful and dimly provocative image from Johann Siebacher’s Wasserstein der Weisen, oder chymisches Tractaetlein…. *, a curious alchemy book of obscured pubom Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher’lishing heritage, printed around 1660, is a sort of standard celestially-disembodied standard, though in this case the torch-holding hand may be coming through a trinitarian window/hole in the sky, straight from the body of the Der Herr Gott. Or perhaps not: perhaps this is an illustration of alchemical genius emerging from a Biblical interruption in the sky, igniting a heart-held philosopher’s stone fixed to a well-rooted sepulchre, the very tree of life. The religiously-robed folks are retreating into the deeper shadow without the sight of the gloriously-enlightened lump, plainly visible to the plain observer.

Or not. Siebacher uses an epigram at the end of his book calling the whole chymical art into question: “It is an easy matter to prepare gold in the furnace out of metals:
at times there is found a man to whom the secret is revealed. Why is not
every alchemist rich? The reason is that one thing is wanting which many
seek with anxious care. Common gold is not fixed, and, when brought to
the test of fire, quickly disappears and perishes. But he who knows the
tired gold, which at all times remains the same, and from which nothing
is lost, he is the possessor of the true Art, and may be called a good
and practical Sage and Chemist.” Rich in vision, and in spirit, with holes in the pockets.

*Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher.
Wasserstein
der Weysen, das ist, ein chymisch Tractätlein, darin der Weg gezeiget,
die Materia genennet, und der Process beschrieben wird, zu dem hohen geheymnuss
der Universal Tinctur zukommen, vor diesem niemalen gesehen. Darbey auch
zwey sehr nutzliche andere Büchlein der Gleichformigkeit und Concordantz
wegen angehenckt, nemlich, 1. Iohan von Mesung. 2. Via veritatis der einigen
Warheit…, Frankfurt, 1619, 1661, 1703, 1704, 1709, 1710, 1743, 1762.

Or,

The Sophic Hydrolith; or Water Stone of the Wise, That is, a chymical work, in which the way is shewn, the matter named, and the process described;
namely, the method of obtaining the
universal tincture. Chapter
One: A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF THE WONDERFUL WATER STONE OF THE WISE, COMMONLY
CALLED THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.

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Revolutions in the Color “Red”: Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

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A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my
mind. Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself. V. van Gogh

Pure color! You must
sacrifice everything to it… P. Gauguin

Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a
window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a
long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a
pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of
patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi,
communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury, important burial dress of the
Cro-magnums, signs of divine favor and
condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China ,
Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower
realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing
impropriety, and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in
modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and
science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly
coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff. The birth of impressionism (with Monet and
the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the
rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen
and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of
red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red
roots began here.

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the
epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was
nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century. The two men showed—and this would have been
incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had
their own spectral signature. When the
Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did
Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all
the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the
elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science
fiction come true. The second part of
the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years
later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved that the red shift that occur in the spectra
of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but
not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional
to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang. Cosmological significances aside, this was
also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very
major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the
brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s
Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of
the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid,
Kepler, Newton
and so on—it just didn’t come into play.

Now, as to the importance of Red in art. It comes for me with Gauguin. Gauguin and his red grass. Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in
the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything. It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea
of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by
it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of
each individual interpretation. It
happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the
beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would
not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words,
and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this
is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED. There’s much more to be said about the
Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of
science, but that’ll have to come later.

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion
that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in
France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried”
shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of
their canvases.

_______

*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the
so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of
1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum
mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, “A Relation
between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae”
(1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
of

America

,
Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

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Return to the Poem-amatic: Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Poetry Engine
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Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.
–Rene Magritte

I am very fond of images like this–images that show us everything and nothing. The engraving was meant to show some of the ephemeral antique bric-a-brac collected by whatever collector was currently residing at Chantilly. Remove that explanation, and the meaning of the engraving goes spinning into whatever space you open for it. It is a wonderful thing to open these dis-associated image combinatorics to free interpretation, each viewer finding their own meaning in a mysteriously composed components.

This of course was an unintentional artifact of the artist and engraver. Images like this–confusing, anti-intuitive, misleading–weren’t constructed to be so (at least not in a major and determined way) until the arrival of the Dadaists in the 20th century. This was a short-lived, proto-archaic (?) group with a confusing history, a tumultuous existence, and a short and sure ending. They were disengaging from the avant garde to form a group that went somewhat beyond*

(Even the naming of the group is a story of unusual ripeness and spoilage, no one being able to tell the truth of how it came into being. Suffice to say that “dada” either was or wasn’t found by an accidental grazing through Larousse by Tristan Tzara in February 1916. At least Hans Arp tells this as the true story, saying too that he was there, along with his 12 children and a brioche in his left nostril. Anyway the naming doesn’t seem to matter terribly much to a group like this that disposed of and twisted names proper and otherwise.)

An example of a Dadaist work is at right, by Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919)

The Dadaists, born in the Cafe Voltaire, were interested first in the written arts, and didn’t move to painting and the plastics for a couple of years. The first among these creative equals was probably Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro, 1896–1963) who was first a writer and poet before an artist. True to the Dadaist great non-existent history, Tzara set forth a method of constructing poetry. It was basically an engine for a simultaneous poem, as in the “bruitist” Futurists tradition, which built upon the work of Hugo Ball, who in turn was the inventor of the sound poem (Lautgedicht). And so tongue deep in cheek, Tzara set forth these principles:

To make a Dadaist poem:
- Take a newspaper.
- Take a pair of scissors.
- Choose an article as long as
  you are planning to make your poem.
- Cut out the article.
- Then cut out each of the
  words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
- Shake it gently.
- Then take out the scraps one
  after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
- Copy conscientiously.
- The poem will be like you.
- And here you are a writer,
  infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though
  beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
(Some few weeks ago I made a post about an automatic poem-making device–the poem-amatic fist micrroscope–a
fun little bit about making poems of ordinary printed pages by
recording what you saw of them in the visual field seen through the
barrel of a semi-closed fist.
Then there is the entry “Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist
Mr. Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.;
1923-1988))” in my growing and imaginary museum catalog called Weltin and
Wantin. Mr. Norme constructed poems in
much this same way, except that he stripped his poems out of the lines of his
books. His effort is here, called Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies
brillantes (by “the man who found obscure
phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic
ideal”).

Now.
I tried this out, but not with newspaper–rather I did it with Tzara’s instruction itself, and let me tell you, it doesn’t work. There’s just too much left to chance, and, frankly, too many prepositions, too much grunting work.

On the other hand, if you lay out the pieces before you and determine to allow yourself 15 minutes to select a poem from the scattered bits on the table, then the method does stand some sort of chance.
Here’s what I came up with, and it is almost something or other; at least I think that is probably not nothing. In the very least, though, it is a very interesting exercise, trying to get your mind to find a poem in strips of paper. In that way Mr. Tzara was perfectly correct.

(Below is a fragment of Mr. Norme’s work.)

_______

* Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting
point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on
pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for
anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the
foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator’s introduction to Francis Picabia‘s I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
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The First Fisheye View? Vienna, 1529

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This magnificent woodcut, The Siege of Vienna*, executed by Nicolaus Meldmann, was published in 1529/30 and depicts a view of the city of Vienna from an extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented perspective. I’ve paid some attention to antique images that look straight down at things (Looking Straight-on At Things and Looking Straight-Down on Things) and I can say that they are in general pretty uncommon–this is the first time though that I’ve noticed a fish-eye view looking straight down, an image conveying a 360-degree horizon-to-horizon landscape. It is just simply phenomenal, even if a fair number of the buildings in town are missing and so on–the (unnamed) artist-on-the-spot actually climbed a high spire and made a number of sketches, extrapolating it all into this horizon-bending whole. But the representation of the city wasn’t the paramount concern in the print–it was the placement of what was going on outside of it that was important. And what was happening concerned all of Europe–it was the invasion by the Muslim Ottoman
Empire, led by Sultan Suleiman I (the magnificent), and in 1529 they had made their way through Hungary and into central Europe, laying seige to the principal city of Vienna with an army of 150,000 (or 300,00) soldiers. . It was the high point of the Ottoman expansion, as they were ultimately turned back by the Austrians in a determined and complex series of battles of mining/tunnels versus anti-mining and anti-tunnels (such battles being fought, still, deeply into World War I). So this print was made for a wide audience of Europeans, trying to get a glimpse of the siege of Vienna and the positions of the Ottoman forces, knowing that the outcome of the siege could very well hold the fate of the rest of Europe.

If you check out the other posts in this blog on “Looking Straight Down” you’ll see a number of examples of early straightdownedness–none though approach the vast area that the artist of this print had taken under control and displayed.

*I found this reproduction in Landau and Parshall’s beautiful, attentive and intuitively incisive The Renaissance Print,1470-1550, published by Yale University Press in 1994. It is a rich book, with very deep depth and a light touch, hard to do in an academic/historical work. But they did it.

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Van Helmont’s Lovely Title Page and his Sorry Slip into Curative Magnetism

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Joan Baptiste van Helmont’s
A ternary of paradoxes : the magnetick cure of wounds, nativity of tartar in wine, image of God in man.
(printed in London by James Flesher for William Lee, 1650), offers its own unintended paradoxes (and joined the field of relatively few books with the word “paradox” in their title). Purportedly a work of science, van Helmont offers the reader his views on the curative powers of the loadstone. Of particular interest is Helmont’s (1579-1644) discussion of the weapon salve, a cure for injuries caused by knives and swords. The unique feature of this ointment was that it was not applied to the wound but to the weapon which caused the wound, though in the midst of other very problematic scientific observations, this wasn’t so bad. For example, Helmont presented a recipe for making scorpions, which involved bricks, sunlight and basil, from which a scorpion would come.

And what exactly is Helmont’s place in the history of science? Difficult to say: he did make several important physical discoveries, and did present what some have called the modern approach to experimentation (firm insistence on relateable objects in empirical observation and so on); however, he was a reaching alchemist misty mystic who rejected syllogistic thought, mathematics*, human reasoning. These are hard bits to let go.

All this said, what with scorpions and magnetic treatment of wounds, he comes close to the generation of infection in wounds: “Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient air…repleted with various

evaporations or aporrhoeas of mixt bodies, especially such as are then
suffering the act of putrefaction, violently invadeth the part and
thereupon impresseth an exotic miasm or noxious diathesis, which
disposeth the blood successively arriving at the wound, to
putrefaction, by the intervention of fermentation. ” With his magnetic
sympathy, Van Helmont expressed clearly the doctrine of immunity and
the cure of disease by immune sera: “For he who has once recovered from
that disease hath not only obtained a pure balsaamical blood, whereby
for the future he is rendered free from any recidivation of the same
evil, but also infallibly cures the same affection in his
neighbour…and by the mysterious power of Magnetism transplants that
balsaam and conserving quality into the blood of…’
Problematic greatness just needs to be understood in greater detail
than simply disregarding everything because someone disdains logic…

Note:

The interesting image in the middle of the title page is more religious symbolism than what seems to be a straightforward physics reference, and the bulk of it lies in the “lumen de lumine” inference, which in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses faith in Jesus Christ as Lumen de Lumine (Light from Light). Once you replace the optics with the divine, the rest of the image and its relationship to the contetns of the obok becomes more clear.

*

Helmont thought about the restrictiveness of mathematics, and that the quantitative aspects of things that math addressed missed their interior qualities, thus making mathematics not able to see what things are. Oopsie.

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The Discovery of Nothing: Things out of Place Deparment #4 AND a History of Blank and Empty Things #32

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This is really just another bit of fun–the four objects in the sky weren’t unrelated to the scene, not at all, though if you wanted you could certainly create a fantastically rigorous and bizarre story for them; they certainly did define the concept of “nothing” for the Blank & Empty Things thread of this blog. here is no doubt that the image has a very quiet, possibly Dadist origin. In fact, this is one illustration from one of the greatest experimental physics books of the 17th century, coming as it does from Otto von Guericke’s Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672). In another minute department, this one is also I guess the greatest book ever written by a Mayor of anywhere (as von Guericke (1602-1886) was mayor of

Magedeburg for 33 years). The image shows the greatest of von
Guericke’s efforts, and one of the greatest (or most important)
experiments in experimental science–the dramatic demonstration of the
vacuum, showing here that teams of horses could not pull apart two
halves of an evacuated sphere, and of course the efficacy of air
pressure operating against it (um, the vacuum). The “floating” bits in the sky were an exploded view of the sphere that was the subject of the experiment.

What was more important though, and what the general reader today might easily miss, was that von Guericke created something that many scientists and philosophers said didn’t, and couldn’t, exist: the vacuum. In modern times, Copernicus depicted the universe as a vast void; Descartes came in the back door (following the ancient and interesting though incorrect theory of Aristotle*), not liking the idea very much, and claiming that such empty space couldn’t exist. Von Guericke provided the proof that the vacuum, that nothing, did exist.

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*Aristotle (384-322 BCE) theorized that as air became thinner objects moving through it would move faster, which is true; he further speculated that if there was no air at all, that if vacuums did exist, then objects would move infinitely fast, which he correctly assumed was not possible, and thus the vacuum could not exist.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of