Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Figuratively Speaking



I was thumbing through the Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur des Bildarchivs Foto Marburg website (Themen: natur) when the above 2 Georg Donauer images caught my eye. They date from 1611 and were in a Stuttgart festival book if I'm not completely misunderstanding. Donauer's name comes up in relation to iconography, architecture and musical instrument engravings in searching but it's a disparate link spread.

The eccentric caricatures reminded me of the outstanding series below by Braccelli (1624). This book was largely ignored until it was 're-found' in the mid-20th century and a new edition published.






The 50 surreal illustrations from Bizzarie di Varie Figure by Giovanni Battista Braccelli are online among the Digital Materials from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress.
Definitely go see these 2 entries by misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo on Braccelli - if I haven't said it enough before, the Giornale is an outstanding website and I'm forever grateful for misteraitch's support and advice in relation to maintaining BibliOdyssey.

5 comments :

Anonymous said...

Again, these are very cool images—a quick search didn’t turn up much about Donauer, except that he engraved the images in this book, which seems to be the source of the pair of images you found (see pages 78-79). There are lots of rather interesting images in the same book: see, for example, these fellows

It looks like the images are not so much examples of the ‘mannerist grotesque’ like Braccelli’s engravings, but rather than they’re illustrations drawn from life of some actual grand parade / tournament staged in celebration of the marriage of Johann Friedrich Herzog von Württemberg and Barbara Sophie von Hohenzollern, in 1609.

peacay said...

Oh thanks, that's an outstanding book. There's some exquisite engraving in there (although I'll probably think of it as the curtain or lounge material series)

I swear I searched! At least you prove my editorial correct!

Anonymous said...

just picked up the paperback of the book the prestige by christopher priest which i was delighted to find had a Braccelli engraving from this series on it's cover.

peacay said...

Oh, that headless image = Blemmyai (down the front page in 'cosmographia on India')

And jmorrison, I'm surprised the Braccelli figures haven't turned up on t-shirts and posters (or have they?)

juniorbonner said...

get your Braccelli tshirt here -

http://www.cafepress.com/juniorbonner.41787188

anything else I can do for you

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