Posts filed under 'Museum Lust'
imaginative/anachronistic illustration of the Bushnell Turtle
unknown artist
Submarine artist/tattoist Duke Riley and compatriots were cited Friday morning in NYC for towing a “strange-looking” replica Revolutionary War sub near the Queen Mary 2. The strange sub is apparently modeled on the Bushnell Turtle. Several Turtle recreations have tested, including one by the students of Old Saybrook High School.
Riley’s version can be seen in action in this flickerset:
And here’s a lovely steampunk version of the Turtle by Rick and Laura Brown (2003):
The Browns’ sub model is prettier, but Duke Riley handily wins the contest for best artist’s statement:
My work addresses the prospect of residual but forgotten unclaimed frontiers on the edge and inside overdeveloped urban areas, and their unsuspected autonomy.
I had to read that one a few times. And it gets weirder. According to Riley’s website,
From 1992 to 1997, I lived and worked in an 8 by 10 foot pigeon coop constructed out of a widow’s walk on the roof of an old dilapidated building in Providence, RI. I shared the space with both domestic and street pigeons.
Wouldn’t it have been great if he took pigeons along in the Turtle?
August 4th, 2007
Bernard Palissy, 1565-1585
As promised, here’s the Palissy snake serving dish from the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s very similar to the one from the British Museum, except that the colors in this piece seem much brighter. I like the duller plate at the BM better, but that’s kind of like preferring the unrestored Sistine Chapel to the brightly colored version Michaelangelo (presumably) intended. We have an irrational attraction to patina in this technological age. The variety of shells and leaves evoke Palissy’s interest in fossils - I wonder if he intended this selection of specimens to represent a certain geographical area, or just combined whatever organisms he thought would look yummiest under some stew?
August 2nd, 2007
The Lady of Shalott, 1888
John William Waterhouse
I arrived at the Tate Britain (better known by its former name, the Tate Gallery) Monday morning, only to discover that their entire inventory of pre-Raphaelites had been removed from display a few hours before.
I nearly had an American temper tantrum on the spot. Adoration of the pre-Raphaelite collection (including Millais’ Ophelia, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, etc.) was my entire reason for visiting. I could have easily gone to the Tate last week had I known of the impending change. There was no warning on their website, and the museum’s rep admitted it wasn’t planned until next week. My travel karma is seriously awry!
Luckily, the excursion was salvaged. I saw one Rossetti, his late work Proserpine, and four paintings by Burne-Jones and Waterhouse, who are usually shoehorned in with Rossetti and Millais but in this case were in the next (not emptied) room over. Very lucky for me indeed, since Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott may be my favorite. painting. ever.
I know the last decade’s surfeit of pre-Raphaelite nostalgia has made everyone heartily sick of large-eyed, anguished damsels. But this painting has been part of my psyche for over twenty years, just as long as The Lord of the Rings. As with LOTR, no amount of popular abuse can diminish my affection for it.
Background on the Lady of Shalott/Elaine of Astolat
Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (text and more and more)
Waterhouse depicted this story three times. This painting is his earliest, and I think, the best, although I also love his 1894 version. I prefer Waterhouse’s versions over those of his contemporaries because all three are portraits - his Lady has a personality. She’s the legendary victim of unrequited love, of course, but she’s not passive. She chooses her own destiny (or is willfully self-destructive) when she chooses to look out the window at Lancelot. She’s haunted. She’s despairing. She’s angry. She represents the tension between the cloistered, unreal sphere of art (”I am half-sick of shadows”) and the passionate sphere of the body. And of course, fueling infinite feminist analyses, she represents how women have historically been punished for violating social constraints and embracing their independence or sexuality:
Nevertheless, it is hard to read his, or the other, images as anything but an oblique account of the confined and restricted world of the Victorian woman–accursed and prohibited by virtue of her sex alone–and the dire consequences attendant on rebellion. The rejection of seclusion in the shadowy sphere of prescribed femininity, where the approved activity is weaving or embroidery, leads immediately to ostracism and social death. The enclosed rooms in which these ladies live, looking out on inviting sunlit landscapes, and the tangled threads binding their vigorous limbs, are surely metaphors of woman’s condition, signifying the docile, passive, reflective and domestic role that dominated Victorian ideas of femininity. The lady cannot break from her constraints: her gesture of independence provokes the curse. It is interesting that most artists chose to depict this particular moment, so that their ladies are frozen forever in their decision of defiance (Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, 1987).
At the Tate, I saw few details that my close (ok, obsessive) examination of this painting in books and posters hadn’t already revealed. But one pleasant surprise was that most of the painting, aside from the face, is almost impressionistic, thick with buttery smudges of paint. The tapestry draped from the boat is especially rough, almost coarse.
To me, the strength of the brushstrokes seemed better suited to the magnitude of the themes involved than the pretty, polished impression one gets from a reproduction. Millions of dorm room posters notwithstanding (and despite Lancelot’s insipid comment “she has a lovely face,”) this is not a pretty painting at all - it’s downright frightening. If you get what I mean by that, then you probably like the painting as much as I do.
July 31st, 2007
Lead-glazed polychrome-painted earthenware dish
Workshop of Bernard Palissy, Paris, circa 1575-1600
British Museum
Just in case you didn’t find Laura Zindel’s creepy-crawly place settings unusual enough, here’s a treasure from the British Museum: an antique dish embellished with sculpted snake, insects, crayfish, and frogs.
I can’t help but wonder what you’d eat off such a plate. Would the snake’s head poke invitingly from a pile of pasta? It’s just not right! Yet Palissy was hugely popular in his own time (clients included European royalty and the Medicis) and his work enjoyed an even greater resurgence in the Victorian era.
Palissy was also an intuitive paleontologist. His observations of geology and hands-on experience making casts of natural specimens convinced him that fossils were impressions of plants and animals:
I at length found more fishes and shells in that form, petrified upon the earth, than there are modern kinds inhabiting the ocean, for which reason I have been bold enough to say to my disciples that Monsieur Belon and Rondelet had taken pains to describe and figure the fishes found by them during a voyage to Venice, and that I considered it strange that they never troubled themselves to understand the fishes that formerly dwelt and multiplied abundantly in regions of which the stones, that have congealed at the same time when they were petrified, serve now as register or original of the forms of the said fishes. (Palissy the Potter: The Life of Bernard Palissy, by Henry Morley)
Palissy’s insight aligns him with da Vinci, who also grasped the formation of fossils well ahead of the scientific pack.
Similar snake dishes by Palissy or his followers are found at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Met. Apparently the Victoria & Albert have a number of Palissy pieces as well; I’ll be keeping an eye out for them later this week when I’m in South Kensington.
Update: here’s the Palissy plate they have at V&A.
July 29th, 2007
Ah, the British Library. In one room: Shakespeare’s First Folio, Thomas More’s last letter to Henry III, Lewis Carroll’s diary, the Gutenberg Bible, a letter from Darwin to Wallace, a letter from Newton to Hooke, Shakespeare’s mortgage, Magna Carta, a page from Edward VI’s diary (very bad handwriting), the manuscript of Jane Eyre. I got goosebumps! The British Library is also holding a special exhibition of religious texts, called “Sacred.” The Lindisfarne Gospels alone are worth the tour, but I began to go into shock after an hour of world-class illuminated manuscripts.
My favorite document - and this surprised me - was actually a little 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It lay open to 116, probably his most famous sonnet, and one of my favorite poems. Have a guess at the first two lines?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. . .
Sonnet 116 is actually mislabeled in the British Library’s copy - the 6 is flipped, to read 119. But there was no mistaking one of the finest love poems ever written:
Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
July 29th, 2007
Back when I was six or seven, my personal computer was a cassette-tape driven TRS-80, and my favorite game was Pyramid. Pyramid was an endearingly primitive choose-your-own adventure game, in which you gave the program commands it rarely understood, hoping to randomly stumble on something useful, like THROW BIRD. I made it pretty far into the game, only to discover at the heart of the infamous maze of twisty passages, a coin-operated vending machine!
I felt totally ripped off: everyone knows there were no vending machines in ancient Egypt! The game lost some of its luster from this cheap anachronism, and eventually I gave up, moving on to the more fast-paced Centipede clone, Slay the Nereis (OK, I just paused in the middle of writing this post to waste thirty minutes playing Atari’s online version of Centipede. I still get a thrill from the sound of those falling fleas, but how I miss the arcade version’s rollerball).
Anyway, it turns out that Egyptian vending machine wasn’t such a stretch after all. Ancient machines that were derided as toys or flights of fancy are now taken seriously by archaeologists and engineers. The Antikythera mechanism is the best example of this (there was an excellent article about it in the May 15 New Yorker). And Cabinet of Wonders just posted a wonderful essay and collection of links on ancient automata. It’s incredibly interesting reading.
Apparently there was a coin-operated vending machine (for holy water!) two thousand years ago - designed by the Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria (or Heron). That was long after the Pyramids were built, but who knows? Maybe Hero wasn’t the first to figure it out. The Antikythera Mechanism survived, albeit in terrible condition, but how many gadgets, including proto-computers and primitive robots, have been lost? It’s a dizzying question - but also an important reminder that biologically, we are neither more intelligent nor more creative now than our ancestors were a few thousand years ago. We’re just starting at a much higher technological baseline.
July 19th, 2007
Coeleoptera Pendant
Jennifer Trask
Ornamentum Gallery
Jennifer Trask’s reliquary-like ornaments contain natural specimens like feathers, beetles, wings, and snakeskin. She is represented in the collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and others.
Brooches
Jennifer Trask
Metalsmith Magazine profile
July 18th, 2007
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)
Joseph Wright of Derby
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump - detail
(view zoomed image at the National Gallery of London)
Wouldn’t it be excellent if science was still conducted in darkened, intimate chambers lit by candles, as in these wonderful paintings - part of a series of posts on chiaroscuro at { feuilleton }?
Sure, you could get the same dramatic effect by holding lab meeting huddled over a UV transilluminator - but oh, the inconvenient mutagenesis.
July 6th, 2007
portrait of James Ferguson, astronomer
Oh, look! Legions of Dead White Males with (natural laws, anatomical parts, minerals, equations, geological features, organisms, diseases, scientific societies) named after them! And some little prankster drew spectacles on Ferguson.
Scientific Identity: Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology
via
July 6th, 2007
This gorgeous glowing artifact is, believe it or not, the basin of the sink in the guest bath at Lakewold Gardens. It was also the closest thing to the sun that I saw all day. Love ya, Seattle!
July 1st, 2007
“Flayed Angel”
Jacques Gautier d’Agoty
If you’ve not yet done so, pop on over to new blog Morbid Anatomy for a tour of some beautiful vintage medical illustrations. My favorite recent post was this collection of links to the work of anatomical artist Jacques Gautier d’Agoty.
Gautier d’Agoty’s “Flayed Angel” is the inspiration for this poem, by Leslie Adrienne Miller, from her new collection, The Resurrection Trade
. I am really excited to get this book in the mail. It’s inspired by depictions of anatomy, especially female anatomy - by Gautier d’Agoty, van Rymsdyk, da Vinci, Vesalius. If the following poem is any indication, it’s good stuff.
“The Flayed Angel”
Gautier D’Agoty’s mezzotint of the muscles of the back
Because her back is turned on us
and peeled outward from the ribs,
her namesake wings of skin surprise us
into thinking Fra Angelico—who taught
us all what textures wings might take
in two dimensions, an undulating
series of overlapping lines, a borrowing
from feathers, waves in sand, nothing
like the surface epidermis marked
with random blots or breathing glands
seeking after air any way they can.
If she were photograph or simple lines,
less art or more science, what we’d miss
is the man who had to be there
in the flesh with tray of graving tools
and pair of living eyes, who had
to read her with a knife and scrape
the burr from every rib, who had to know
the permanence of every cut. D’Agoty’s
flaps of flesh are scored with etching’s
textures, places where he meant the acid bath
to eat a weave of shadows into copper plates—
after which the inks pushed out their wells
of dark on water, thighs or fields, anywhere
the light is kept from falling, places
where the eye is urged to go but never see.
So this angel’s wings have corrugations
like boxes, cups, or woven fabric,
a tidiness of purpose that belies the tease
of bundled curls caught above the collar
of her open spine in its red spindles
of gristle. The artist must have thought
the coif a kindness. Perhaps he even knew
that women in the countryside made ready
for a birth with combs and ribbons,
believed first pains meant time for curls.
So were these wings D’Agoty’s kindness too,
his offer of a way she might escape
the grave? Or should we read these artful
cuts as consequence of process,
a simple accident of God.
Hear more poems from The Resurrection Trade via Minnesota Public Radio.
June 20th, 2007
Last weekend I discovered Seattle’s Gas Works Park. By accident. And ended up on a tour through the derelict gasworks - led by the park’s designer, Richard Haag. The structures are fenced off, so I got the impression this was an unusual privilege. Fortunately my camera’s battery wasn’t completely exhausted, though I was torn between taking photos and listening to Haag recount his efforts several decades ago to convince the city that the industrial site could be bioremediated. Among his persuasive arguments: growing a nice crop of tomatoes in what was thought to be dead soil.
A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to be successfully reclaimed for public use through bioremediation (although it is still monitored, and intermittent cleanup efforts continue).
My first reaction was WTF?!? How could I know nothing about this extraordinary place? I am so impressed with the city of Seattle (and Haag) for maintaining the towers in their rusty steampunk glory, instead of leveling them, as the original plans for the site demanded. Out of 1400 such gasification plants once operating across the US, this is the largest remnant left standing.
From the park outside, the gasworks now resemble a gigantic modern sculpture with a fashionably distressed patina. The unreal blue-green of the Seattle grass contrasts so strongly with the red rust that it stings the eyes. But in among the towers, the scene is ghostly. Blackberries twine lushly through the iron girders, obviously undaunted by any lingering contamination in the soil. Small piles of bleached bones, perhaps from rodents or birds, litter the ruins. Only a few dangling loops of slender T1 cable, probably from a security system, betray that the Internet Age has supplanted the Industrial.
Although the refinery is barely over 100 years old (and despite its rivets and cogs, not properly “steampunk” at all), rain and benign neglect have left it seemingly ancient, like a half-exposed fossil. I hope these images capture its aura of timeless decay.
June 18th, 2007
Bodyscope Anatomical Chart, 1935
approximately 20″ x 16″
Ralph H. Segal, Bodyscope Publications Inc.,
Educational Building, 70 5th Ave., NYC
From 1935, two ornate Bodyscope teaching charts. Three windows in each chart allow a cutaway view of the torso and its accompanying legends (in the arches on either side) to rotate, providing five different views of the internal organs. A numbered key below the figure indicates which of the organ systems is currently displayed. The University of Kansas Clendening Library has a complete set of images in its collection (of the male, the female, and a third organ system chart).
The combination of period fonts, Art deco flourishes, and almost iconographic framing is charming. The spandrels on either side of the arched legends hold portraits of historical luminaries of medicine like Vesalius. Most of the text is anatomical description. However, the legends directly above the figures relate not to science, but to the larger social & moral context in which human anatomy was taught. For the man:
Man’s great Accomplishments and noble Aspirations are achieved through the possession of a Sound Mind and a Healthy Body . . . In these Attributes lie the Bulwark of Man’s Social, Moral, and Domestic Structure: the Foundation which perpetuates Humanity’s Existence.
For the woman:
Woman, her creative body as wisely patterned by God, is the Abode wherein the Seed is endowed with Life and imbued with a Soul. . . Her Maternal nurturing and inspirational influence are reflected in Mankind’s aspirations; the fruits of which become her Reward.
What a contrast between active and passive roles! Man is the disciplined architect, woman the. . . gardener? Man “perpetuates Humanity’s Existence” (I thought that particular activity involved both sexes), while the woman gets Rewarded with symbolic fruits. Nice. It’s interesting, though not surprising, that such moralizing was considered an appropriate way to preface medical education.
For additional detail, have a look at this near-mint specimen offered by Stonegate Antiques.
Incidentally, the Bodyscope chart set is labeled both “copyright 1935″ and “patent pending.” I can’t find evidence of a patent actually issuing. However, one RH Segal is the inventor of record on another patent from 1935, for a perpetual calendar which also employed a system of paper dials. It’s likely the same individual.
June 11th, 2007
I love gears, I love type, I love paper art: virtual field trip, courtesy of the Rag & Bone Blog.
June 9th, 2007
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