In 1894, archaeologist Édouard Piette discovered the “Venus of Brassempouy,” otherwise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in southwestern France and dating to around 25,000 BCE, this carving represents the earliest realistic depiction of a human face. The figure’s forehead, nose, and brows are carefully carved in relief, as is the hair, arranged in a neat geometric pattern. But what happened to the mouth? Or the eyes? We’re not sure.
The Venus is carved from mammoth ivory, likely using a stone flint, and stands just 3.65 cm tall. For some, it marks a major development in figurative art. Or, as historian Simon Schama has suggested, this figurine may well be the “dawn of the idea of beauty” in human culture.
Those are reserved for first-class citizens whose virtuous lives earned them passage to the uppermost heights.
Down below, stringed instruments produce the most hellish sort of cacophony, a fitting accompaniment for the horn whose bell is befouled with the arm of a tortured soul.
Let us hope they stopped shy of shoving flutes up their bums. (Such a placement might produce a sound, but not from the flute’s golden throat).
The Bosch experiment added ten more instruments to the museum’s already impressive, over 1000-strong collection of woodwinds, percussion, and brass, many from the studios of esteemed makers, some dating all the way back to the Renaissance.
Unfortunately, the new additions don’t sound very good. “Horrible” and “painful” are among the adjectives the Bate Collection manager Andrew Lamb uses to describe the aural fruits of his team’s months-long labors.
Might we assume Bosch would have wanted it that way?
Bosch and his contemporaries viewed music as sinful, associating it with other sins of the flesh and spirit. A number of other instruments are also depicted: a harp, a drum, a shawm, a recorder, and the metal triangle being played by the woman (a nun, perhaps) who is apparently imprisoned in the keybox of the instrument. The hurdy-gurdy was also associated with beggars, who were often blind. The man turning the crank is holding a begging bowl in his other hand. Hanging from the bowl is a metal seal on a ribbon, called a “gaberlunzie.” This was a license to beg in a particular town on a particular day, granted by the nobility. Soldiers who were blinded or maimed in their lord’s service might be given a gaberlunzie in recompense.
To the best of our knowledge, no gaberlunzies were granted, nor any sinners eternally damned, in the Bate Collection’s caper. According to manager Lamb, expanding the boundaries of music education was recompense enough, well worth the temporary affront to tender ears.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
In ancient Egypt, writing hieroglyphs was a highly specialized skill, one commanded by only a small fraction of the population. The fact that there were more than 1,000 characters to memorize probably had something to do with that, but the variety of surfaces on which hieroglyphs were written couldn’t have made it any easier. Depending on the occasion, ancient Egyptians used papyrus, wood, metal, and pottery shards as writing surfaces. The most monumental or religiously important texts, however, got carved into stone, thus ensuring the words a kind of eternal life — a particular concern in the cases of tomb walls and sarcophagi.
There may be little call to write hieroglyphs today, but the techniques to do so haven’t been lost. In the new video above from the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor and stone carver Miriam Johnson demonstrates how to carve into stone the name of Pharaoh Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid (and indeed, was buried in it).
The first step is to write that name, surrounded by its cartouche, on a sheet of carbon paper. This isn’t the brush and ink that the ancient Egyptians would have used, granted, but for the rest of the project, Johnson sticks to the old-fashioned ways. With the image transferred, and using nothing more than a mallet and a chisel, she carves the hieroglyphs into the stone not just once but twice.
The first time, Johnson carves in “sunken relief,” a technique that involves cutting the image out of the surface of the stone. The second time, she renders Pharaoh Khufu’s name in “raised relief,” which requires cutting out everything but the image, creating the effect of the hieroglyphs rising out of the stone. With the former “you see more of the shadows”; with the latter, “you’ve got more opportunity of putting more texture into the characters.” Seen in a state of completion — by a layman, at least — Johnson’s carvings wouldn’t look out of place in a museum exhibit on ancient Egypt. Even if tools manufactured in the twenty-first century produce a few subtle differences from the real thing, give these stones a millennium or two to age, and they’ll surely look even more convincing.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Imagine you could talk to Hieronymus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Revelation, or of the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre 15th century text written in an uncrackable code; that you could solve centuries-old mysteries by asking them, “what were you thinking?” You might be disappointed to hear them say, as does Luigi Serafini, author and illustrator of the Codex Seraphinianus, “At the end of the day [it’s] similar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speaking to you, but it’s just your imagination.”
If you were a longtime devotee of an intensely symbolic, mythic text, you might refuse to believe this. It must mean something, fans of the Codex have insisted since the book’s appearance in 1981.
It shares many similarities with the Voynich Manuscript, save its relatively recent vintage and living author: both the Seraphinianus and the Voynich seem to be compendiums of an otherworldly natural science and art, and both are written in a wholly invented language.
Serafini tells Wired he thinks Voynich is a fake. “The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II loved ancient manuscripts; somebody swindled him and spread the rumor that it was original. The idea of made-up languages is not new at all.” As for his own made-up language in the Codex, he avers, “I always said that there is no meaning behind the script; it’s just a game.” But it is not a hoax. Though he hasn’t minded the money from the book’s cult popularity, he created the book, he says, “trying to reach out to my fellow people, just like bloggers do.” It is, he says, “the product of a generation that chose to connect and create a network, rather than kill each other in wars like their fathers did.”
The Codex, writes Abe Books, who made the short video review above, is “essentially an encyclopedia about an alien world that clearly reflects our own, each chapter appears to deal with key facets of this surreal place, including flora, fauna, science, machines, games and architecture.” That’s only a guess given the unintelligible language.
The illustrations seem to draw from Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, and the medieval travelogue as much as from the surrealism of contemporary European artists like Fantastic Planet animator René Laloux.
Serafini has been delighted to see an extensive internet community coalesce around the book, and has had his fun with it. He “now states,” writes Dangerous Minds, “that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the Codex in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and ‘wrote.’” You can now, thanks to a recent, relatively affordable edition published by Rizzoli, purchase your copy of the Codex. Buy now, I’d say. First editions of the book now fetch upwards of $6000, and its popularity shows no sign of slowing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
The expression “Don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, implying that the recipient’s creative skills aren’t up to attracting a career-supporting audience. But it can also be practical advice in certain cases, especially those of artists possessed of a sensibility too particular and strange to bear direct exposure to the marketplace. So it was with Henry Darger, who deliberately passed his 81 years in near-absolute obscurity, working increasingly menial janitorial jobs by day and, when not attending one of his five daily masses, obsessing over his art the rest of the time. That art took various forms, most notably The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco–Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which has been described as the longest work of fiction ever written — and the strangest.
As described in the video above from Fredrik Knudsen (and in the 2004 feature-length documentary In the Realms of the Unreal), its 15,145 pages relate the adventures of a set of immaculately virtuous little girls against the backdrop of an apocalyptic, ultra-violent religious war. When Darger’s landlords discovered the work after his death, they also turned up a variety of drawings, paintings, and collages, many of them at least obliquely related to the story.
Against backdrops alternately idyllic and harrowing, the Vivian girls often appear naked, sometimes bewilderingly outfitted with male genitalia. Though clearly composed without formal training of any kind, Darger’s visual compositions demonstrate an askew kind of proficiency, or at least a kind of staggering evolution over the course of decades. Whatever the appeal of his work, there’s never been an artist like him. Nor could there be, given the highly specific stretch of history occupied by his long yet rigidly bounded life.
Not long after Darger’s birth in the Chicago of 1892, the death of his mother followed by the incapacitation of his father plunged him into a childhood of Dickensian-sounding hardship, spent in institutions with names like the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. An aggrieved loner seemingly afflicted by what we would now call mental health difficulties from the start, he took a kind of refuge in the fantasy cohering in his head, one shaped equally by mass print media phenomena like Winnie Winkle and Little Annie Rooney, Civil War photographs, and ultra-devout Catholicism. Since his posthumous discovery and elevation to the status of the ultimate “outsider artist,” there’s been no end of speculation about his personal habits, sexual proclivities, and state of mind. But with all such questions beyond resolution, we can, for the moment, leave the last word to the artist himself: “It’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It doesn’t take too long a look at the almost surrealistically clean-lined buildings of Walter Gropius to get the impression that the man wanted to usher in a new world, especially when you consider that many of them went up before World War II. Take the Bauhaus Dessau building, which, though completed exactly a century ago, looks like a concrete transmission from the future that never arrived, or one that may indeed still be on the way. It once housed the German art school turned political and cultural engine he founded in 1919, whose principles included absolute equality between male and female participants — or they did at first, at any rate.
Soon deciding that the new institution wouldn’t be taken seriously with too high a proportion of women, Gropius limited their enrollment to one-third of the student body. That episode, among others that underscore the ways in which Gropius and the Bauhaus’ ostensible commitment to the advancement of women wasn’t all it could be, figures into Susanne Radelhof’s documentary The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women.
Yet whatever the shortcomings in that department one might identify from a twenty-first century vantage, the fact remains that the Bauhaus made possible — or at least encouraged — more enduring and influential work by female artists and designers than almost any art school in early twentieth-century Europe.
Among the almost 500 women who studied at the Bauhaus, the film profiles figures like Alma Buscher, “who created prototypes of avant-garde furniture and toys”; “visionary metalsmith and designer” Marianne Brandt; Gunta Stölzl, whose “weaving revolutionized modern textile design” (weaving eventually being the main program to which women were admitted); Friedl Dicker, a “multitalented artist” dedicated to the Bauhaus; and Lucia Moholy, whose “exceptional photographs still influence how we view Bauhaus design today.” The school itself may have shut down in 1933, owing to the conflict between its aesthetic and political ends and those of the rising Nazi Party, but the forward-looking nature and worldwide cultural influence of the Bauhaus have ensured that we still feel the influence of its alumni, male and female alike.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) never saw a rhino himself, but by relying on eyewitness descriptions of the one King Manuel I of Portugal intended as a gift to the Pope, he managed to render a fairly realistic one, all things considered.
Point taken, but cats were well integrated into medieval society.
Royal 12 C xix f. 36v/37r (13th century)
Cats provided medieval citizens with the same pest control services they’d been performing since the ancient Egyptians first domesticated them.
Ancient Egyptians conveyed their gratitude and respect by regarding cats as symbols of divinity, protection, and strength.
Certain Egyptian goddesses, like Bastet, were imbued with unmistakably feline characteristics.
The Vintage News reports that harming a cat in those days was punishable by death, exporting them was illegal, and, much like today, the death of a cat was an occasion for public sorrow:
When a cat died, it was buried with honors, mummified and mourned by the humans. The body of the cat would be wrapped in the finest materials and then embalmed in order to preserve the body for a longer time. Ancient Egyptians went so far that they shaved their eyebrows as a sign of their deep sorrow for the deceased pet.
Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 f. 23v (England, c 1200)
The medieval church took a much darker view of our feline friends.
Their close ties to paganism and early religions were enough for cats to be judged guilty of witchcraft, sinful sexuality, and fraternizing with Satan.
In the late 12th-century, writer Walter Map, a soon-to-be archdeacon of Oxford, declared that the devil appeared before his devotees in feline form:
… hanging by a rope, a black cat of great size. As soon as they see this cat, the lights are turned out. They do not sing or recite hymns in a distinct way, but they mutter them with their teeth closed and they feel in the dark towards where they saw their lord, and when they find it, they kiss it, the more humbly depending on their folly, some on the paws, some under the tail, some on the genitals. And as if they have, in this way, received a license for passion, each one takes the nearest man or woman and they join themselves with the other for as long as they choose to draw out their game.
Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull in 1484 condemning the “devil’s favorite animal and idol of all witches” to death, along with their human companions.
He is a full lecherous beast in youth, swift, pliant, and merry, and leapeth and reseth on everything that is to fore him: and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith: and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice: and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and reseth on them in privy places: and when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play. In time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grievously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with another: and unneth is hurt when he is thrown down off an high place. And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about: and when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home; and is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.
Pigs and rats also had a bad rep, and like cats, were tortured and executed in great numbers by pious humans.
The Worksop Bestiary Morgan Library, MS M.81 f. 47r (England, c 1185)
Not every medieval city was anti-cat. As the Academic Cat Lady Johanna Feenstra writes of the above illustration from The Worksop Bestiary, one of the earliest English bestiaries:
Some would have interpreted the image of a cat pouncing on a rodent as a symbol for the devil going after the human soul. Others might have seen the cat in a completely different light. For instance, as Eucharistic guardians, making sure rodents could not steal and eat the Eucharistic wafers.
Bodleian Library Bodley 764 f. 51r (England, c 1225–50)
St John’s College Library, MS. 61 (England (York), 13th century)
It took cat lover Leonardo DaVinci to turn the situation around, with eleven sketches from life portraying cats in characteristic poses, much as we see them today. We’ll delve more into that in a future post.
Conrad of Megenberg, ‘Das Buch der Natur’, Germany ca. 1434. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms.2.264, fol. 85r
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.
Over the centuries, a variety of places have laid credible claim to being the world’s art center: Constantinople, Florence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten millennia, the hot spots become rather less recognizable. Up until about 20,000 years ago, it seems that creators and viewers of art alike spent a good deal in one particular cave: Liang Metanduno, located on Muna Island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province. The many paintings on its walls of recognizable humans, animals, and boats have brought it fame in our times as a kind of ancient art gallery. But in recent years, a much older piece of work has been discovered there, one whose creation occurred at least 67,800 years ago.
The creation in question is a handprint, faint but detectable, probably made by blowing a mixture of ochre and water over an actual human hand. To determine its age, researchers performed what’s called uranium-series analysis on the deposits of calcium carbonate that had built up on and around it.
The number of 67,800 years is, of course, not exact, but it’s also just a minimum: in fact, the handprint could well be much older. In a paper published last week in Nature, the researchers point out that its age exceeds both that of the oldest similar rock art found elsewhere in Indonesia and that of a hand stencil in Spain attributed to Neanderthals, “which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide.”
It isn’t impossible that this at least 67,800-year-old handprint could also have been made by Neanderthals. The obvious modification of the hand’s shape, however, an extension and tapering of the fingers that brings to mind animal claws (or the clutches of Nosferatu), suggests to certain scientific eyes the kind of cognition attributable specifically to Homo sapiens. This discovery has great potential relevance not just to art history, but even more so to other fields concerned with the development of our species. While it had previously been thought, for instance, that the first human settlers of Australia made their way there through Indonesia (in a time of much lower sea levels) between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, the handprint’s existence in Liang Metanduno suggests that the migration took place even earlier. All these millennia later, Australia remains a favored destination for a variety of immigrants — some of whom do their part to keep Sydney’s art scene interesting.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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