BibliOdyssey

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Haphazard Scrawls

La Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has perhaps 400 illuminated manuscripts. They form part of the Liber Floridus database that also includes the holdings of La Bibliothèque Mazarine.

It's just mindblowing.

The tiny sample of cropped images here come from Manuscript 0010 - the Manerius Bible, whose 100-odd parchment pages were decorated between 1185 and 1195, probably at the Saint Loupe Abbey in the Champagne district of France.

Ten years in 10 minutes. I am so not worthy.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

It is my sad duty to admit that these (slightly cropped) images constitute the total of this 17th or 18th century Turkish manuscript. I found it at the librit website at the University of Bologna. It's worth visiting to see the manner of book from which they come as well as the binding. If you go to this page and enter 'turbanti', click enter, and then click on the title of the page that appears, the manuscript will open in a new screen.

The translation of the manuscript description -

Catalogue of the turbans. Ms., sec. XVII, cart., cc. 81, milimeter 90x240. With 218 colored illustrations to pen and. The manuscript reproduces, in shape of ritratti stilizzati, the various personages who could themselves be met in the Ottoman empire of the sec. XVII. The reference and to the social class, to loads political-administrative with the personage, to the profession, its ethnic-geographic belongings. Every figure contains didascalie in Ottoman Turk and - on the back - its transcription and translation in Italian. Album of the sort, with galleries of personages, not rare in the Ottoman art, is present in several Italian and European libraries. The importance and the rarita one of this copy are in the documentation, rich and lively above all for the turbans and hairdos of the personages, nonche in the wealth of the didascalie bilanguages.

Luyken and The Martyrs Mirror

1685 frontpiece

The Martyrs Mirror by Tieleman Jansz van Braght was first published in 1660 in Dutch and titled "The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus, their Saviour, from the time of Christ to the year A.D. 1660". I read in passing that it was a reworking and elaboration of another account of early christian martyrs from the first half of the 17th century.

Burning of William White, an English priest from Norwich (1428)

The most famous edition of this 1200 page tome was released in 1685 and was accompanied by 104 copper engravings by Mennonite Jan Luyken (or Luiken) that depicted hanging, burning, torture, beheading, crucifixion, boiling and on and on - a veritable artistic encyclopedia of inhumanity. The book records the stories and prison accounts of the deaths of 800 mainly Anabaptist and Mennonite martyrs - the defenseless in the title refers to the Anabaptist belief in non-resistance.

Luyken was greatly influenced by the writings of Jakob Böhme and produced up to 3000 mostly religious engravings during his life. He was a well known poet also and songs or poems often accompanied his engravings. His other famous accomplishment, completed with the assistance of his son, was the engraving of illustrations for the 1694 publication, Het Menselyk Bendryf or Book of Trades, portraying occupations from the late 17th century.

Blandine, half-roasted on a grill and thrown to the wild bulls (AD 172)

I first encountered this book through the Bibliotheek van de Universiteit van Amsterdam (translation) which possibly has the highest resolution images available but the site is slow and employs a java popup window (and is in Dutch).
The better site to me to see all the images from the book is the Mennonite Library and Archives website, which is also in english.
Background and publication history.
The complete text of the Martrys Mirror.
Further works by Jan Luyken - engravings and poetry.
UPDATE Sept. 2008: Jan and Casper Luyken collection.

Anthropomorphic Pedagogy

Scalp Dance

Rape of the Yarn

Henry Christopher McCook (1837-1911) was a clergyman and scientist who published research articles and books on ants and spiders. But in order to popularize his regard for the natural world, he published a couple of fairy tale books in which the insects were portrayed with human characteristics. Tenants from an Old Farm came out in 1885 and Old Farm Fairies was released in 1895. The images here are from these books.

Dame Nature Stripping Young Polyphemus

McCook employed an illustrator named Daniel Carter Beard (who was responsible for all the pictures here but didn't do every illustration in the books) who happened into book illustration accidentally when he was employed as an engineer and somebody obtained his permission to publish a few of his drawings. He made so much money that he quit his job and turned to illustrating for the rest of his life.

Beard grew to be much more famous than McCrook in fact. He went on to produce many illustrations for Mark Twain's novels as well as publishing a lot of political cartoons. But he is best remembered for founding the Boy Scouts movement of America.

Mattrass-Making: Tucking up the Tufts of Upholstery

The National Academy of Sciences digital collections display: The Fairy Tale World of Henry McCook: Illustrations of Anthropomorphic Arthropods in the 19th Century (from the Ewell Sale Stewart Library) [the 2 books are in the sidebar & further illustrations from each are also linked]
These links will take you to further pages about Beard and his illustrating/scouting . (some of them are caches and I'm not sure why Rochester U pages are unavailable - ?relocation)

{Seeing the pencil graffiti on some of these illustrations reminds me of finding library stamps on digitized medieval manuscripts and the like - it's incredible how often it seems to happen and even more incredible that it hasn't been remedied.}

Monday, October 10, 2005

Historical Anatomies

These are just random details taken from images out of a large selection of historic anatomical texts that I've been perusing online over the last hour or so. I was tempted to focus on a couple of works - in fact most of the images here come from the University of Iowa Hardin Library website, where I started - but ultimately I decided that I might just well post all the links (mostly from the National Library of Medicine), some of which have been circulating around over the last couple of years. This entry can be my link resource for future reference, if nothing else.

These (author names & publication date) all lead to thumb pages unless otherwise stated -

*Asterisks refer to the publication date being (well) after the work was written (and there are maybe 4 or 5 I didn't do this for - it was a thought that came to mind when I added the later entries).

Where does the art finish and the science start?

Hebrew Micrography

Omer calender detail: Italy, ca. 1825 Micrographic text: Five Megillot
(Esther, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations)
B (NS)Mc43

One of the few traditional Jewish artforms, micrography, a sub-branch of calligraphy, arose in the middle east in about the 9th or 10th century, and was particularly used in biblical works. As suggested by the name, micrography employs tiny lettering which is distributed as a pattern to provide shadowing or embellish artwork or form artistic motifs themselves, as with the deer above.