… IS, WELL, WHAT YOU SEE
Or The Lego Box View of the World of Yore and a Few Other Considerations
I’ve been spending a lot of time leafing through old atlases and encyclopedias, both physically and on the net, and have become enamoured of the various and varying views of the world of yore*.
Image trawling is like looking for pieces in a box of Lego.
When our son was small, purchases of Lego would remain reverently, albiet briefly, confined to the boxes they came with, but after a while, when the novelty had worn off, they joined the multitudes of other pieces in a large plastic utility box – one of several in fact. These would be overturned on th floor with a flourish prior to undertaking any major building project, whether fantastical (the favourites, especilly with a father always both home and happy to revert to childhood via plastic blocks from Denmark) or from the instruction books. Hours and hours I’ve spent raking through drifts, heaps and piles of the things in search of one kind of brick, or one colour of one kind of brick.
Now, where all this is going is that one’s brain (well, mine, anyway) seems to be capable of searching for a maximum of three or four combinations of shape and colour. What doesn’t tally is invisible, so if one is in dire need of a red single-row brick with five bumps, then differently-coloured pentabumpèd blocks are missed, as are blocks of other colours but the right number of bumps.
The same goes when poring over imagery. I often have exchanges with my re-enactor-cum-historian friends that go along these lines. “Did you notice all those different halberd shapes in that manuscript?” “Halberds? Can’t recall. there were lots of interesting lanterns, though.” When you’re looking for the cut of hose, you miss the shapes of roof gables, and vice-versa. So, it’s already hard enough spotting things when the images are trustworthy, but when face value is not necessarily guaranteed…
This meandering and musing because I’ve been spending a good deal of time lately looking at pictures. Mostly from the 16th to 19th centuries, beginning with what we call The Age of Discovery and up through the Age of Enlightenment to the Industrial Age. (I just love how we love breaking everything down into Ages. Actually, I got briefly side-tracked too, into the Golden Age of Illustration, via the two-volume biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Irwin Porges and a few chance quotes from the astonishing illustrator J. Allen St. John, but that’s for another Time, right now I’m just content to resist the urge to haul down my three-volume Limited Centennial Edition of The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library of Illustration, but thankfully it’s a hefty tome on a lofty shelf, as I hardly need to get sidetracked yet again.)
Back to the 16th century. The imagery in the first atlases is doubly fabulous. First of all because of the exotic nature of the subject matter, secondly by the elbow room given to the imagination of the cartographers. Imagine the feverish activity in the studios producing them. First of all, it was a great fad by that time, every well-to-do bourgeois wished to possess maps and images of the newly-discovered continents. Conversely, copper-plate etching doesn’t allow for much improvisation, so the combination of breaking news (relatively speaking) and the marathon of intensive labour involved made atlases, encyclopaedias and mappamundi complicated and expensive to produce. (Small wonder the notion of copyright was developed at that precise time.)
By 1650 and 1700 there were eighteen major centres producing maps in Europe. Now of course, these weren’t the practical kind, the ones you would expect to travel from A to B with, they were for an entirely different kind of travelling, that of the imagination. Partly because solid contours beyond familar shores were hesitant in coming, and partly to make these grand maps something handsome to look at, elaborate cartouches with supporting figures and expecially fanciful scenes took up much of the surface. Equally fanciful creatures crawled the waves, and while “Hc svnt draconis” only ever appeared on one map, the spirit was there.
As Jonathan Swift somewhat wryly remarked:
‘Geographers in Africk maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.’
Walter Salmon, writing in the late 1600’s, had this to say about representing a standard element, the Four Winds. The East Wind, Eurus, should be “a youth with puffed and blown cheeks (as all the other winds must be), wings upon his shoulders, his body like a Tauny Moor, upon his head a Red Sun.” Zephyrus, the West Wind, should be a youth with a garland of flowers on his head, holding in his arms a swan about to sing. Boreus, on the other hand, should be rendered in the unappealing guise of an old man “with a horrid terrible look; his hair and beard covered in snow, or the hoar-frost, with the feet and tail of a Serpent.” As for Auster, the south wind “with head and wings wet, a pot or urn pouring forth water, with which descends frogs, grasshoppers and the like creatures which are bred by moisture.” (This is the border of the heady territory where secret society and esoteria buffs love to roam, with coded allegories that are just as likely to mean anything as nothing, or simply an illustrator’s whim.)
Salmon, by the way, was another of those fascinating “Renaissance men”, who wrote about everything from “landskips” to medicine to palmistry. Here is his recipe to cure baldness: “The following things are very good. Rub the head or bald places every morning very hard with a coarse cloth, till it be red, anointing immediately after with Bear’s grease: when ten or fifteen days are passed, rub every morning and evening with a bruised Onion, till the bald places be red, then anoint with honey well mixed with Mustard seed, applying over all a plaster of Labdanum mixed with mice dung, and powder of Bees : do this for thirty days… If all the former fail, bathe with a decoction of Bur-dock roots, made with a Lixivium (of Salt of Tartar) two parts, and muskadel one part; immediately applying this Unguent : take Thapsi or Turbeth one drachm (in powder) bear’s grease one ounce, mix them, which use for sixty days; if this make not the hair come, the defect is incurable.”
Needless to say, his “POLYGRAPHICE : OR THE ARTS OF DRAWING, ENGRAVING, Etching, Limning, Painting, Washing, Varnishing, Gilding, Colouring, Dying, Beautifying & Perfuming in Four Books &c. To which is added a Discourse of Perspective and Chiromancy.” is indispensable. (It went through eight editions between 1672 and 1701 and, according to the author, sold over fifteen thousand copies.)
The seventeenth century also saw a certain “democratising” of art, with intellectuals deploring the public’s craze for imagery “for the wrong reasons”; wishing to have pictures as decoration in their homes rather than reserving them for a certain elevation of spirit. English philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, railed against the unstoppable trend in 1713, bemoaning “this false Relish, which is govern’d rather by what immediately strikes the Sense, than by what consequentially and by reflection pleases the Mind, and satisfys the Thought and Reason…”
Others were catering to the fashion. A book, “The Art of Painting in Oyl” first published in the 1670’s, was re-issued in 1701 with a special chapter on colouring maps. Or, according to the title page: “Wherein is included each particular circumstance relating to that art and mystery. Containing the best and most approved rules for preparing, mixing, and working of oly colours. The whole treatise being so full compleat, and so exactly fitted to the meanest capacity, that all persons whatsoever, may be able by these directions, to paint in oyl-colours all manner of timber work; such as posts, pails, pallisadoes, gates, doors, or any thing else that requires either use, beauty, or preservation, from the violence or injury of the weather. In which is also particularly laid down, all the several circumstances required in painting of sun-dials, printed pictures, shash-windows, &c. In oily-colours. The third impression with some alterations, and many matters added, which are not to be found in the two former editions. To which is added, the whole art and mystery of colouring maps and other prints with water colours.” The author, John Smith, encouraged map colouring as a pastime “for those Gentry, and others, who delight in the Knowledge of Maps; which by being coloured, and the several Divisions distinguised from one another by Colours of different Kinds, do give a better Idea of the Countries they describe, than they can possibly do uncoloured.”
Maps were of course printed in black and white and coloured by hand. “Limning” was an art in itself, a direct descendant of the illuminating trade applied to new technology. (One does wonder what the tone was amongst illuminators with the appearance and lightning prolifigation of the printing press.) A hundred years before Smith, an Englishman named Richard Tottill had already published a treatise intended for limners: “A very proper treatise, in which is briefly sett forthe the art of Limming, which teacheth the order in drawing and tracing of letters, vinets, flowers, armes and imagery, & the manner how to make sundry sises or grounds to laye silver or golde uppon.”
The early days of the map trade was nevertheless a cuthroat affair, with copper plates being stolen, cut up, re-used, and otherwise changed – a skillful engraver could erase existing titles and replace them with others, thus getting a leg up on the competition. Add to that the intense networking to make sure of getting the latest titbit of news from afar to add a new bit of coastline or even a new continent, it must have been a very exciting and hectic time to be in the illustrating business.
How I wish I could be a fly on the wall in Sebastian Muller’s workshop in the early 1500’s. One imagines the illustrators and engravers labouring away at the Cosmographia.
“How’s that spot illustration of the Pyramids coming?”
“All right. Well, actually, I haven’t started yet.”
“What! But you know we need that for the folio that’s going to press next week!”
“I know, I know, I was just wondering, don’t we have any better documentation than Pliny? Something more recent? I mean, an “idle and silly display of royal wealth” isn’t a lot to go on.”
“Recent, schmecent, they’ve been there forever, they haven’t changed since Pliny, stop stalling!”
“But I don’t know what angle the slope is, you want me to get it right don’t you?”
“Our esteemed customers aren’t going to trot off up the Nile to double-check now are they, just get on it. You’d have to be crazier than a Frenchman to want to go traipsing off to Egypt!”
“You know, my great-grampa told me his uncle went to Rome to see Saint Peter’s before Julius had it torn down, and he saw a pyramid there.”
“In Rome?”
“Yep, in Rome.”
That’s preposterous, no Egyptians in Rome.”
“But shall I go with it anyway? Gramps gave me a little sketch. From memory.”
“Make it round for all I care. No, don’t. I didn’t mean that. I meant just get it done.”
“Right away sir, I’m on it now.”
“Wonderful. By the way, have we already done the grand view of Rome? Perhaps we should put in your great-grandpa’s pyramid.”
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The Pyramids at Giza, from a 1580 edition.
But nothing beats the 19th century for the heady lyrism of soaring inexactitude, especailly as one might think they would know better by then. The late 1800’s saw illustrations everywhere – books, flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, periodicals. Illustrative reporters filled the role today occuped by reporters with cameras, in a time when photoreporting was still in its infancy, illustrators with sketchpads and pens supplied the public’s desire for up-to-date imagery. If I recall correctly, even the Grand Rackham, Arthur Himself, started out working for the Pall Mall Budget and other similar publications, diligently drawing brave firefighters and carriage pile-ups until his wife finally persuaded him to drop it for book illustration and fairy tales.
The other day I picked up a copy of Volume One of CELEBRATED TRAVELS AND TRAVELLERS: THE EXPLORATION OF THE WORLD by none other than Jules VERNE (who one more readily imagines travelling to the centre of the Earth than through its history) and I haven’t put it down since. Not only is it pretty decent reading, with a different choice of significant travellers than English books usually provide, but the illustrations are astonishing. As the title pages says: WITH 59 ILLUSTRATIONS BY L. BENETT AND P. PHILIPPOTEAUX, AND 50 FAC-SIMILES OF ANCIENT DRAWINGS. (Published by SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON, London, 1882. There are two more volumes, on the 18th and 19th centuries.)
Now, the facsimiles are indifferently rendered, but the other illustrations are truly priceless. Christopher Columbus looks like he would be more at home at the helm of the Nostromo, and Spaniards happily roast and massacre Aztecs and Incas (but in a nice, unassuming way, even the Indians look quite relaxed) or have them devoured by dogs. Explorers forge doggedly towards beaches through dramatic surf (very handy for silhouetting those purposeful if slightly waterlogged strides).
Vasco Núñez de Balboa arrives stage left, a curtain of vegetation draws back, and the Pacific Ocean is shimmering at his feet like the Promised Land (well, the promised Southern Sea), complete with generic native showing the way with an eloquent gesture of raised arm that borders on resignation. (Resignation he shares with the indolent supporting figures of feathered Amerindians that quickly became painters and illustrators’ standard fare for the symbolic heraldry accorded all these new possessions.)**
Actually, it’s Balboa that suddenly brought rushing back what must be dozens of similar images to my mind. An infinity of versions of the same image, to such an extent that it goes beyond event and anecdote into that curious realm of myth-history, where dwell those iconic images that spring unbidden to mind, summoning an idealization, not history at all. The 19th century was very good at that, and it has supplied us with a common fund of idealized visions on which our view of the past still unconsciously yet profoundly relies.
Anyway, here are three of the best pictures in the book. Enjoy.
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Left: The Normans land on the south coast of England aboard the most astonishing fairy-tale ships. No wonder the Anglo-Saxons were no match for them.
Centre: The Glaciers of Greenland. Ice cathedrals, or perhaps Greenland Gothic. I love the way the Vikings have left their drakkar like a tourist coach at the curb and are strolling about taking in the sights.
Right: Canadian landscape. Complete with… palm trees! 19th century forests abroad are always huge and luxurious beyond measure. The few mandatory humans are of equally compulsory minuscule stature.
