The Seven Liberal Arts

"The areas of secular education considered liberal have their foundation in classical antiquity and were codified in the medieval period into a distinct set of seven, with two subdivisions. The upper division, the quadrivium, consists of Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music; while the lower division, or trivium, is made up of Grammar, Logic (or Dialectic), and Rhetoric. [..]

The tradition of artistic representation of the Seven Liberal Arts may be traced to the fifth-century work of Martianus Capella*; his allegorial treatise, 'De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Libri Novem' ['Satyricon'], describes the Seven Liberal Arts as personified female figures with specific attributes and companions." [source]

Musica

Concentum inter se, et discrimina grata
sonorum aure erudita deprehendit musica

Music, a woman, sits at a harpsichord; another female plays a lute and two youths embraced by an elder sing and hold tablets; a man sits at right and plays on a lute and the ground is strewn with instruments; more instruments hang from the wall, including a bagpipe and trombone.

Geometria

Vestigare geometriae intervalla locorvm est,
qvamqve alto, longa, et lata rervm corpora

Geometry, a woman, uses compasses to measure the globe watched closely by two male figures; various measuring devices are in the foreground together with academic tomes.

Arithmetica

Haec contemplandis numeris ars gaudet,
eorum occulta sollers ervens mysteria

Arithmetic, a woman, seated at a table inscribes a tablet accompanied by an elderly woman and two male scholars; the elderly woman stands over her and instructs her; her dress is numbered "1234..." and two tomes are labelled "ABRAHAM" and "PYTHAGORAS".

Astrologia

Astrorvm Vraniae cvrsvs, variosqve recvrsvs ocvlis
notans fvtvra mente praevidet; Astrorum Uraniae cursus

Astrology, a winged female personification, leans besides a globe with zodiacal star symbols; on the ground are various scientific instruments and sundials etc; an eagle spreads its wings and stands besides a pile of books labelled "ANAXIMENES" etc.

Dialectica

Vti hominem ratione docet dialectica quare
merito artium apicem magnus hanc plato vocat

Dialectic, a woman, seated on a wicker chair, engages in conversation with an elderly philosopher; she rests her feet on a stack of tomes labelled "ARISTOTELES" etc; a bird sits on her head, an eel is wrapped around her arm and a frog sits on an upright tome.

Grammatica

Grammatica os tenerum pueri, balbum que
figurat, scientiarum ceterarum ianitrix

Grammar, a seated old woman, teaches a young boy standing besides her the rudiments of reading and writing; she holds a long staff, leans over and points to the pages of the book held by the youth; her dress has the letters of the alphabet; in a school room with students and various labelled scholarly tomes.

Rhetorica

Rhetoricae gratos sermoni astvta colores
qvo dvlcivs flvat is ad avreis advcit

Rhetoric, a seated woman, holding a caduceus, leans over and engages with a seated man writing on a tablet; an elderly man with a long beard places his hands on the shoulder of the younger scholar; two birds, including a parrot, sit on a pile of books labelled "CICERO" etc on the ground.

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The allegorical mannerist images above were engraved by Cornelis Cort (after Frans Floris) and published in Antwerp in 1565 by Hieronymous Cock.

"One of the most famed printmakers of his day, Cornelis Cort was admired for his ability to translate tonal qualities into a black and white engraving. Cort accomplished this in part through an important technical innovation: It is the nature of an engraved line, cut as it is with a tool (the burin) whose cutting edge comes to a sharp triangular point, to begin as a point, swell almost imperceptibly at the center, and narrow to a point again at the end. Cort exploited this quality of the burin line; by varying his pressure on the tool as he gouged the plate, he developed a flexible line that becomes thicker and thinner along its length, creating various degrees of darkness without adding additional lines."

The first six plates above come from the Folger Shakespeare Library Image Collection [homepage]; the last picture (and most of the notes) is from the BM.

See: The Seven Liberal Arts at New Advent.

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About a year ago I was talking with my teenage niece and I asked her if there had ever been any instruction in web searching as part of her regular school work (there hadn't been). My niece and her mother both expressed surprise when I suggested that the art of searching involved more than just pointing a browser to google.com. Considering the amount of time and energy we devote to searching for information online, it's logical to assume that life would improve (yes, marginally!) if we were all better versed in the tricks and skills associated with formulating useful search queries.

I'm no expert on search and only wish I remembered and used more than a handful of the advanced techniques from the various cheat sheets around the traps. Web search is usually pretty easy most of the time of course, particularly nowadays, with all the options available to modify the queries. In terms of school I had more in mind the idea of learning the strategies and paths one might take - beyond advanced operators - for complex searches, like when it's better to hit specific types of databases or when you should give up and email somebody, for instance. It's this development of lateral thinking that I would have thought merited a bit more than hit-or-miss / trial-and-error approaches in school classrooms.

If web search is itself an occasionally complicated procedure, it usually pales by comparison to the elaborate tasks involved, more often than not, in image searches; depending on the target picture desired. One of the main difficulties comes from the translation of a text query into a visual result. Sure, that's stating the bleeding obvious, but the problem is that the desired image might not have the words "red hat" or "dubois" or "15th century engraving", or whatever your search term is, in the alt or title tags or as text on the webpage near the target. So searching with the usual text terms can be fruitless or at least less successful.

Now I love google images and use it all the time - I use it as much as a conduit to discover background information in fact - but it's only ever partially useful: a good place to start in the same way as wikipedia can be a good place to start when looking for textual background and links. We now also have the emerging dimension of similarity based image search which I haven't used a lot, but it's another weapon in the arsenal.

I see image search (much like web search in a way) as a problem solving exercise: some people like doing crosswords, I like hunting down visual materia obscura. I don't think it would be particularly useful to outline the steps I take to solve a specific query - they are all individual and the steps I might take will differ accordingly - but I thought it might be useful to some people if I post all the sites I have in a drop-down 'art' folder in my browser. If you are reading via a feedreader, there are a whole bunch of links under 'resource sites' in the sidebar of BibliOdyssey - that include some of these listed below - but they tend more towards the library and exhibition types. The links in the browser folder are where I actually go to find stuff when I'm looking to fill out a post with more images than are contained in a single book or from a single web exhibition site, for example. They are necessarily skewed towards the prints and graphics but many of them are generalist art sites and useful beyond my obsessional parameters.

This list is in order of value (to me!). That value is basically a function of how productive of images they are combined with how much I like the site. Science and Society is at the bottom of the list because the bastards watermark copyright-free material; but they are a very useful resource nevertheless because of the very thorough list of linked image descriptors - "hat", "girl", "engraving", etc etc - and they often have unique background information. I think all but one of these links goes directly to a page with a search box (the Lyons site is timer based so you have to click through to commence a session). So I hope these prove useful to someone...

[Incidentally, this post comes via an entry on the WorldCat blog announcing the inclusion of a large record collection (including images) from an enormous consortium of libraries and museums, into the WorldCat database. It's perhaps a little clunky, but it's this sort of consolidation - like the collection search links for the Smithsonian and the V&A below - that makes tracking down obscure material that much easier.]


British Museum Prints Database

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

La base Estampes de la Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon

Rijksmuseum

Smithsonian Institution - Collections Search Center *NEW*

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Victoria & Albert - Search the Collections *NEW*

Culture.fr: le portail de la Culture

Graphische Sammlung Stift Göttweig (Austria)

Ornamental Prints Online (Berlin, Prague, Vienna)

Banque d'Images - Centre de Recherche: Chateau de Versailles

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The National Gallery of Art

Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett

Inventaire du Département des Arts Graphiques (Musée du Louvre)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Detroit Institute of Arts

The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg)

Zeno Image Database (German)

Collage: Guildhall Print Room & Art Gallery

Science & Society Picture Library


Later: I should add that I don't necessarily use these sites, per se, to find a desired image. Often times they merely provide clues: alternative names, associated book and print titles, dating evidence, more examples by the artist or genre in question and sometimes lack of results can hint whether or not further exploration is likely to be of value. And obviously this list is just the beginning. The information gleaned in one or more of these sites may just lead back to google image search and/or on to more specialised portals and the like.

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Sword Hilt Designs

A set of plates by Antoine Jacquard representing designs in blackwork for sword handles, dagger hilts and pommels, decorated with abstracted foliage, grotesques, chimeric figures and drolleries. Produced between about 1610 and 1630. [source]





Dagger hilt with mushroom-shaped pommel featuring a grotesque mask and recurved quillons with ends scrolled like rams' horns; one of five designs for dagger hilts and pommels, from the 'Jewellery Book' by Hans Holbein the Younger in black ink and grey wash. Dates to around 1537. [source]







Another Holbein sketch from the from the same [~1537] 'Five Designs for Dagger Hilts and Pommels' series in which he has shaped the pommels and guards of these highly-finished designs from a variety of motifs in his repertoire, fitting grotesque heads, musicians, acanthus leaves, scaly tentacles and rams’ horns with flowing ease into the required forms of the dagger hilts. [source]

It is thought that one of the most important dimensions of Holbein's tenure at the English royal court was ornamental weaponry design. These hilt types bear stylistic similarities to, for instance, the kind of dagger seen in the drawing of King Henry VIII on this page from the Tate Holbein exhibition site.

{slight tangent: It is probably no little coincidence, then, that the Swiss artist, Urs Graf, incorporated Holbein's famous Danse Macabre figures into an engraved dagger and scabbard design}












Dagger hilt and sheath designs by Heinrich Aldegrever from the late 1530s with acanthus foliage and grotesque motifs. [images spliced together from screencaps] [source]

{Aside: As I recall, Aldegrever wasn't the only artist to copy the Dürer monogram design}











Peter Flötner* hilt designs featuring arabesques, grotesques, trophies and weapon mascarons from the first half of the 16th century [source]

"Original designs for Renaissance swords are exceptionally rare, although notable examples by such renowned artists as Hans Holbein the Younger and Giulio Romano are preserved. Previously unrecorded, the present drawing is a significant addition to this small corpus and is a work of art in its own right. The style and iconography point to Nuremberg and possibly to Peter Flötner* (ca. 1485–1546), one of that city's most versatile artists.

Of robust proportions, the hilt was presumably intended as a side arm to be executed in chased silver or gold. The pommel is conceived in the round with four female heads beneath an imperial crown, while the grip is embellished with a double-headed imperial eagle incorporated into a classical trophy of arms. The guard, formed of undulating branches of acanthus leaves and scrolls, is asymmetrical, one quillon ending in a shield-bearing demi-lion and the other in a Janus head. A lion's head at the intersection of the quillons anchors the composition.

The design is novel and has strong Italianate features, hallmarks of Flötner's oeuvre. The trophies in particular recall one of the artist's woodcut designs for a dagger grip. The distinctive crowned pommel, on the other hand, is virtually identical to one in the design for a sword of Emperor Charles V that is dated 1544 and ascribed to the celebrated Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer* (1508–1585). The present drawing, however, reflects none of the Mannerist aesthetic of Jamnitzer's art and is clearly by a different hand and probably of a slightly earlier date. However, the presence of the imperial iconography suggests that it too was created for Charles V." [source]

A sword hilt with the pommel in the form of a mountain surrounded by a spiral path leading to a temple, drawn by Giulio Romano in pen and brown ink between about 1520 and 1546. The Mount Olympus, as represented here, with the addition of the words "Fides" and "Olympus", was an impressa of the ruler of Mantua, Federico II Gonzaga* (this detail both helps date the design and gives some - although not conclusive - indication of its origins). [source]





1550s design for a dagger and sheath by Wenzel Jamnitzer in brown and black ink, graphite, grey wash and gold hightlighting (the fire). The weapon is decorated with 'the defiance of Mucius Scaevola'*, grotesque figures and an interlace of arabesques, among the many intricate ornamental details. [source]

"This engraving, designed and engraved by Pierre Woëriot, shows a handle and a guard for a sword. The design is inspired by the grotesque, with imaginary creatures bending into the swordhilt. The original design drawing is also in the Museum’s collection (Museum no E.664-1929) this is a copy with slight variations.

Ornament designs like this were copied by artisans and craftsmen. The theme of the grotesque was a popular one around this period. Grotesque derives from the Italian word grottesco. The style was inspired by ancient Roman designs discovered at the end of the 15th century in the underground rooms, or grottoes, of the Golden House of Emperor Nero in Rome. Grotesque ornament was used to decorate a wide range of objects, such as ceramics, and the style was much copied by Renaissance artists."

The above eight incredibly imaginative sword and dagger hilt designs featuring a wide range of structural and ornamental motifs such as chimeric figures, nudes, acanthus leaves, grotesque masks and animal heads. The designs, from about the 1550s and 1560s, are by the French goldsmith and artist Pierre Woeiriot II [Woëriot] (the last couple are either by, or modelled after, Woeiriot's work). [sources: BM, MFA, RM, V&A]








Sword, dagger and scabbard designs by Hans Holbein the Younger and engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar. They date to around the 1640s. [source]





Hilt design in brown ink and inkwash, graphite and white chalk by Polidoro Caldara (aka Polidoro da Caravaggio) from around 1510 to 1540 [source]





Sword hilt, from the mid-1500s, designed by Bernard Salomon featuring arabesques. [source]





This is a republished print from a 1740 series by Gabriel Huquier called 'L'Oeuvre de Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier'. The original Meissonnier designs had been commissioned for rococo goldsmiths: one of these swords was produced for the 1725 wedding between King Louis XV and Maria Leszczyńska of Poland. [source]





Belt, hilt and sundry jewellery designs engraved by RJ Folkemma from the series, 'Liüre de Feüillages et d'Ouvrages d'Orfevrerie Inventees par JL Juge', first published in about 1670 [source].





Design for a hilt in blackwork with pea pods surrounded by two goldsmiths, and a small scene with two swordsmen fighting [1619]. From a small and beautiful series by French enamel-worker, Jean Toutin* [source]





Model of Louis* XVI's coronation sword embellished with rose diamonds. Engraved by Armano in September 1789 (!). [source]





Ornamental dagger hilt design in ink and inkwash, produced in Patna (India) in about 1800. [source]





Hilt design in ink and coloured chalk, produced in Rajasthan (India) in the 17th or 18th centuries. [source]





Design for a naval sword hilt from a watercolour and ink album produced in the late 1800s by GG McCrae* [source]





This plate from an 1880s pattern book for jewellers by A Fischer features various jewels by Tissot as well as the design for a presentation sword hilt. [source]




[In most cases you can click through to an enlarged version. Some of the images were very mildly background cleaned. All those with a black surrounding border were spliced together from screencaps]


This is, without question, a woefully inadequate overview and selection and I probably could have spent another week sifting for further images. I was heartened to read the Met. Museum blurb advising that there aren't that many original Renaissance-era hilt designs around.

• Sword definitions & terminology at the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts.
• More sword and blade terminology at Real Armor of God.
• Wikimedia: swords in art.
• Sword Forum International and their fairly extensive link pages.
• Doug's Rapier Hilt Making page (from 1998)
• Previously (vague associations) combat & artistry.
• BibliOdyssey on Twitter.
• UPDATE: Some great 1860 plates of hilts by Alexandre Gueyton at la Médiathèque André Malraux de Lisieux (thanks Olivier!).