Beautiful 19th Century Maps of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise & More

Even the least reli­gious among us speak, at least on occa­sion, of the cir­cles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be think­ing of where the con­cept orig­i­nat­ed: Dan­te’s Div­ina Com­me­dia, or Divine Com­e­dy. We each imag­ine the cir­cles in our own way — usu­al­ly fill­ing them with sin­ners and pun­ish­ments inspired by our own dis­tastes — but some of Dan­te’s ear­li­er read­ers did so with a seri­ous­ness and pre­ci­sion that may now seem extreme. “The first cos­mo­g­ra­ph­er of Dante’s uni­verse was the Flo­ren­tine poly­math Anto­nio Manet­ti,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, who “con­clud­ed that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep.” A young Galileo sug­gest­ed that “the Inferno’s vault­ed ceil­ing was sup­port­ed by the same phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples as Brunelleschi’s dome.”

In 1855, the aris­to­crat sculp­tor-politi­cian-Dante schol­ar Michelan­ge­lo Cae­tani pub­lished his own pre­cise artis­tic ren­der­ings of not just the Infer­no, but also the Pur­ga­to­rio and Par­adiso, in La mate­ria del­la Div­ina com­me­dia di Dante Alighieri dichiara­ta in VI tav­ole, or The Divine Com­e­dy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates.

“The first plate offers an overview of Dante’s cos­mog­ra­phy, lead­ing from the low­est cir­cle of the Infer­no up through the nine heav­en­ly spheres to Empyre­an, the high­est lev­el of Par­adise and the dwelling place of God,” writes Dukes. “The Infer­no is visu­al­ized with a cut­away style,” its cir­cles “like geo­log­i­cal lay­ers”; ter­raced like a wed­ding cake, “Pur­ga­to­ry is ren­dered at eye lev­el, from the per­spec­tive of some lucky soul sail­ing by this island-moun­tain.”

In Par­adise, “the Infer­no and Pur­ga­to­ry are now small blips on the page, worlds left behind, encir­cled by Mer­cury, Venus, Sat­urn, and the oth­er heav­en­ly spheres.” At the very top is “the can­di­da rosa, an amphithe­ater struc­ture reserved for the souls of heav­en” where “Dante leaves behind Beat­rice, his true love and guide, to come face-to-face with God and the Trin­i­ty.” You can exam­ine these and oth­er illus­tra­tions at the Pub­lic Domain Review or Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, which adds that they come from “a sec­ond ver­sion of this work pro­duced by Cae­tani using the then-nov­el tech­nol­o­gy of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy” in 1872, “pro­duced in a some­what small­er for­mat by the monks at Monte Cassi­no” — a crew who could sure­ly be trust­ed to believe in the job.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

An Illus­trat­ed and Inter­ac­tive Dante’s Infer­no: Explore a New Dig­i­tal Com­pan­ion to the Great 14th-Cen­tu­ry Epic Poem

Rarely Seen Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Are Now Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Uffizi Gallery

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Explore Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a New Dig­i­tal Data­base That Col­lects Sev­en Cen­turies of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy: A Free Course from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive

We appre­ci­ate illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts and his­tor­i­cal books here on Open Cul­ture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aes­thet­ic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temp­ta­tion to start this para­graph with one of those over­sized ini­tial let­ters that grew ever larg­er and more elab­o­rate over cen­turies past. The online archive of Antwer­p’s Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um offers plen­ty of wood­cut Ws to choose from, includ­ing designs sober and bare­ly leg­i­ble, as well as Ws that incor­po­rate a sprout­ing plant, some kind of saint, and even a scene of what looks like impend­ing mur­der.

If you’re not in the mar­ket for fan­cy let­ters, you can also browse the Plan­tin-More­tus wood­cut archive through the cat­e­gories of plants, ani­mals, and sci­ences. Some of these illus­tra­tions are tech­ni­cal, and oth­ers more fan­ci­ful; in cer­tain cas­es, the cen­turies have prob­a­bly ren­dered them less real­is­tic-look­ing than once they were.

Not all the more than 14,000 wood­cuts now in the archive would seem to fit neat­ly in one of those cat­e­gories, but if you take a look at par­tic­u­lar entries, you’ll find that the muse­um has also labeled them with more spe­cif­ic tags, like “clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty,” “map/landscape,” or “aure­ole” (the bright medieval-look­ing halo that marks a fig­ure as holy).

All these wood­cuts, in any case, have been made free to down­load (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the win­dow that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, Christophe Plan­tin and Jan More­tus, for whom the Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um was named, were well-placed to col­lect such things. The Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um’s web­site describes them as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary duo.

They were the first print­ers on an indus­tri­al scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg of their day.” And if these decon­tex­tu­al­ized arti­facts of the print rev­o­lu­tion strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imag­ine how our sur­viv­ing inter­net memes will look four cen­turies hence. Enter the wood­block col­lec­tion here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 215,000 Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters Span­ning the Tradition’s 350-Year His­to­ry

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Clas­sic Films and Film­mak­ers, Ren­dered in Wood­cut By a Los Ange­les Artist-Cinephile

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the Iconic Illuminated Manuscript

What­ev­er set of reli­gious or cul­tur­al tra­di­tions you come from, you’ve prob­a­bly seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a con­ven­tion­al cross, it has a cir­cu­lar ring, or “nim­bus,” where its arms and stem inter­sect. The sole addi­tion of that ele­ment gives it a high­ly dis­tinc­tive look, and indeed makes it one of the rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ples of Insu­lar iconog­ra­phy — that is, iconog­ra­phy cre­at­ed with­in Great Britain and Ire­land in the time after the Roman Empire. Per­haps the most artis­ti­cal­ly impres­sive Celtic cross in exis­tence is found on one of the pages of the ninth-cen­tu­ry Book of Kells (view online here), which itself stands as the most cel­e­brat­ed of all Insu­lar illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts.

On what’s called the “car­pet page” of the Book of Kells, explains Smarthis­to­ry’s Steven Zuck­er in the video above, “we see a cross so elab­o­rate that it almost ceas­es to be a cross.” It has “two cross­beams, and these del­i­cate cir­cles with intri­cate inter­lac­ing in each of them, but the cir­cles are so large that they almost over­whelm the cross itself.”

That’s hard­ly the only image of note in the book, which con­tains the four Gospels of the New Tes­ta­ment, among oth­er texts, as well as numer­ous and extrav­a­gant illus­tra­tions, all of them exe­cut­ed painstak­ing­ly by hand on its vel­lum pages back when it was cre­at­ed, cir­ca 800, in the scrip­to­ri­um of a medieval monastery. These illus­tra­tions include, as Zuck­er’s col­league Lau­ren Kil­roy puts it, “the ear­li­est rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Vir­gin and Child in a man­u­script in West­ern Europe.”

This is hard­ly a vol­ume one approach­es light­ly — espe­cial­ly if one approach­es it in per­son, as Zuck­er and Kil­roy did on their vis­it to Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin. “When we were stand­ing in front of the book,” says Kil­roy, they “noticed how many folios formed the book itself” (which would have required the skin of more than 100 young calves). Com­ing to grips with the sheer quan­ti­ty of mate­r­i­al in the Book of Kells is one thing, but under­stand­ing how to inter­pret it is anoth­er still. Hence the free online course pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, which can help you more ful­ly appre­ci­ate the book in its dig­i­tized form avail­able online. Even if the cross, Celtic or oth­er­wise, stirs no par­tic­u­lar reli­gious feel­ings with­in you, the Book of Kells has much to say about the civ­i­liza­tion that pro­duced it: a civ­i­liza­tion that, insu­lar though it may once have been, would go on to change the shape of the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece the Book of Kells Is Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Man­u­script the Book of Kells

Dis­cov­er the Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script Les Très Rich­es Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Cal­en­dar” (1416)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest Botanical Illustrator of All Time

Pierre-Joseph Red­outé made his name by paint­ing flow­ers, an achieve­ment impos­si­ble with­out a metic­u­lous­ness that exceeds all bounds of nor­mal­i­ty. He pub­lished his three-vol­ume col­lec­tion Les Ros­es and his eight-vol­ume col­lec­tion Les Lil­i­acées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance at their pages today vivid­ly sug­gests the painstak­ing nature of both his process for not just ren­der­ing those flow­ers, but also for see­ing them prop­er­ly in the first place. While Red­outé’s works have long been avail­able free online, the dig­i­tal forms in which they’ve been avail­able haven’t quite done them jus­tice — cer­tain­ly not to the mind of design­er and data artist Nicholas Rougeux.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Rougeux here on Open Cul­ture for his online restora­tions of a host of ven­er­a­ble artis­tic pub­li­ca­tions that lav­ish­ly cap­ture the nat­ur­al world: Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants; British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy; A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ, or Fam­i­ly of Hum­ming-Birds; Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours; and Euclid­’s Ele­ments. Even hav­ing deep expe­ri­ence with those works, Rougeux can declare that, “sim­ply put, Redouté’s illus­tra­tions are stun­ning. His atten­tion to detail in stip­pling and water­col­or has earned him the title ‘the Raphael of Flow­ers’ and is con­sid­ered the great­est botan­i­cal illus­tra­tor of all time.”

Hence Rougeux’s deci­sion to under­take a restora­tion of Les Ros­es and Les Lil­i­acées, an “oppor­tu­ni­ty to become inti­mate­ly famil­iar with his tech­niques and devel­op a deep­er appre­ci­a­tion for his efforts.” The project end­ed up demand­ing eleven months, only some of which were tak­en up by bring­ing the orig­i­nal col­ors back to Red­outé’s paint­ings, which “not only depict the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the ros­es but also con­vey their del­i­cate beau­ty and fra­grance.” Rougeux also had to dig­i­tal­ly re-cre­ate the read­ing expe­ri­ence of these books for the inter­net, cus­tom-design­ing a dig­i­tal gallery for view­ing their ros­es and lilies as they pop out against their new­ly added dark back­grounds.

Plac­ing all of Red­outé’s flow­ers against those back­grounds entailed the real Pho­to­shop labor, tak­ing each image and “mak­ing the lay­er mask man­u­al­ly by care­ful­ly and slow­ly trac­ing along every edge” — for all 655 plates of Les Ros­es and Les Lil­i­acées, as Rougeux writes in a detailed mak­ing-of blog post. “No mat­ter the com­plex­i­ty, I traced every flower, every leaf, every stem, every root, and every hair to pre­serve all the details and ensure that Redouté’s hard work looked as good on a dark back­ground as it did on a light one.” Trans­lat­ing art from one medi­um to anoth­er can be a supreme­ly effec­tive way to cul­ti­vate a full appre­ci­a­tion of the artist’s skill — and in this case, a no less full appre­ci­a­tion of his patience. See the online restora­tion of  Les Ros­es et Les Lil­i­acées here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

Behold an Inter­ac­tive Online Edi­tion of Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants (1868)

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

A Lav­ish­ly Illus­trat­ed Cat­a­log of All Hum­ming­bird Species Known in the 19th Cen­tu­ry Gets Restored & Put Online

In 1886, the US Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioned 7,500 Water­col­or Paint­ings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Down­load Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

The web site Over­look Hotel has post­ed pic­tures of Stan­ley Kubrick’s per­son­al copy of Stephen King’s nov­el The Shin­ing. The book is filled with high­light­ed pas­sages and large­ly illeg­i­ble notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s inten­tions for the movie.

The site fea­tures a pic­ture of the book’s care­worn cov­er along with two spreads from the book’s inte­ri­or —pages 8–9, where Jack Tor­rance is being inter­viewed by hotel man­ag­er Mr. Ull­man, and pages 86–87 where hotel cook Dick Hal­lo­rann talks to Jack’s son Dan­ny about the tele­path­ic abil­i­ty called “shin­ing.”

Much of the mar­gin­a­lia is mad­den­ing­ly hard to deci­pher. One of the notes I could make out reads:

Maybe just like their [sic] are peo­ple who can shine, maybe there are places that are spe­cial. Maybe it has to do with what hap­pened in them or where they were built.

Kubrick is clear­ly work­ing to trans­late King’s book into film. Oth­er notes, how­ev­er, seem whol­ly unre­lat­ed to the movie.

Any prob­lems with the kitchen – you phone me.

When The Shin­ing came out, it was greet­ed with tepid and non­plussed reviews. Since then, the film’s rep­u­ta­tion has grown, and now it’s con­sid­ered a hor­ror mas­ter­piece.

At first view­ing, The Shin­ing over­whelms the view­er with pun­gent images that etch them­selves in the mind—those creepy twins, that rot­ting senior cit­i­zen in the bath­tub, that del­uge of blood from the ele­va­tor. Yet after the fifth or sev­enth view­ing, the film reveals itself to be far weird­er than your aver­age hor­ror flick. For instance, why is Jack Nichol­son read­ing a Play­girl mag­a­zine while wait­ing in the lob­by? What’s the deal with that guy in the bear suit at the end of the movie? Why is Dan­ny wear­ing an Apol­lo 11 sweater?

While Stephen King has had dozens of his books adapt­ed for the screen (many are flat-out ter­ri­ble), of all the adap­ta­tions, this is one that King active­ly dis­likes.

“I would do every­thing dif­fer­ent,” com­plained King about the movie to Amer­i­can Film Mag­a­zine in 1986. “The real prob­lem is that Kubrick set out to make a hor­ror pic­ture with no appar­ent under­stand­ing of the genre.” King lat­er made his own screen ver­sion of his book. By all accounts, it’s nowhere as good as Kubrick’s.

Per­haps the rea­son King loathed Kubrick’s adap­ta­tion so much is that the famous­ly secre­tive and con­trol­ling direc­tor packed the movie with so many odd signs, like Danny’s Apol­lo sweater, that seem to point to a mean­ing beyond a tale of an alco­holic writer who descends into mad­ness and mur­der. The Shin­ing is a semi­otic puz­zle about …what?

Crit­ic after crit­ic has attempt­ed to crack the film’s hid­den mean­ing. Jour­nal­ist Bill Blake­more argued in his essay “The Fam­i­ly of Man” that The Shin­ing is actu­al­ly about the geno­cide of the Native Amer­i­cans. His­to­ri­an Geof­frey Cocks sug­gests that the movie is about the Holo­caust. And con­spir­a­cy guru Jay Wei­d­ner has argued pas­sion­ate­ly that the movie is in fact Kubrick’s cod­ed con­fes­sion for his role in stag­ing the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. (On a relat­ed note, see Dark Side of the Moon: A Mock­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick and the Moon Land­ing Hoax.)

Rod­ney Ascher’s 2012 doc­u­men­tary Room 237 jux­ta­pos­es all of these wild­ly diver­gent read­ings, bril­liant­ly show­ing just how dense and mul­ti­va­lent The Shin­ing is. You can see the trail­er for the doc­u­men­tary above.

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Kubrick Schol­ar Dis­cov­ers an Eerie Detail in The Shin­ing That’s Gone Unno­ticed for More Than 40 Years

How Stan­ley Kubrick Adapt­ed Stephen King’s The Shin­ing into a Cin­e­mat­ic Mas­ter­piece

Free Doc­u­men­tary View from the Over­look: Craft­ing The Shin­ing Looks at How Kubrick Made “the World’s Scari­est Movie”

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

When the names of French poet Paul Élu­ard and Ger­man artist Max Ernst arise, one sub­ject always fol­lows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “mar­riage à trois,” as a New York Times arti­cle by Annette Grant once put it. It start­ed in 1921, Grant writes, when the Sur­re­al­ist move­men­t’s co-founder André Bre­ton put on an exhi­bi­tion for Ernst in Paris. “Élu­ard and his Russ­ian wife, Gala, were fas­ci­nat­ed by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Aus­tri­an Alps and lat­er in Ger­many. Ernst, Élu­ard and Gala quick­ly became insep­a­ra­ble. The artist and the poet start­ed a life­long series of col­lab­o­ra­tions on books even as Ernst and Gala start­ed an affair.”

This arrange­ment “even­tu­al­ly pro­pelled the trio on a jour­ney from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which con­sti­tutes quite a sto­ry in its own right. But on pure artis­tic val­ue, no result of the encounter between Élu­ard and Ernst has remained as fas­ci­nat­ing as Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, the book on which they col­lab­o­rat­ed in 1922.

“It appears that Ernst, still in Ger­many at that stage, cre­at­ed the images first: twen­ty-one col­lages com­posed of engrav­ings cut out of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mag­a­zines and cat­a­logues,” writes Daisy Sains­bury at The Pub­lic Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is care­ful to dis­guise the images’ com­pos­ite nature. He blends each sec­tion into a seam­less, coher­ent whole.”

“Ernst and Élu­ard then worked togeth­er on twen­ty prose poems to accom­pa­ny the illus­tra­tions, send­ing frag­ments of text to each oth­er to revise or sup­ple­ment.” The result, which pre­dates by two years Breton’s Man­i­feste du sur­réal­isme, “rep­re­sents a pro­to-Sur­re­al­ist exper­i­ment par excel­lence.” In the text, phras­es like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nurs­ery rhymes, with a sing-song qual­i­ty stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned croc­o­dile, and a webbed foot trans­formed through col­lage into the ulti­mate sym­bol of human friv­o­li­ty, a fan, evoke the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems of mod­ern sci­ence (and reli­gion before that) as well as their poten­tial mis­use in human hands.”

It’s worth putting all this in its his­tor­i­cal con­text, a Europe after the First World War in which mod­ern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inex­plic­a­ble respons­es of cul­tur­al fig­ures involved in move­ments like Sur­re­al­ism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hit­ting the reset but­ton, to use an anachro­nis­tic metaphor. Not that, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, human­i­ty has made much progress in com­ing to grips with our place in a world of rapid­ly evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy and large-scale geopol­i­tics. Or at least we might feel that way while read­ing Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s dig­i­tal Dada col­lec­tion, and regard­ing these tex­tu­al-visu­al con­struc­tions as deeply strange as any­thing designed by our arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines today.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

A Brief, Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: A Primer by Doc­tor Who Star Peter Capal­di

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

Haru­ki Murakami’s hit nov­el 1Q84 fea­tures a mem­o­rable scene in a taxi­cab on a grid­locked free­way whose radio is play­ing Leoš Janáček’s Sin­foni­et­ta. “It is, as the book sug­gests, tru­ly the worst pos­si­ble music for a traf­fic jam,” writes Sam Ander­son in a New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file of the nov­el­ist: “busy, upbeat, dra­mat­ic — like five nor­mal songs fight­ing for suprema­cy inside an emp­ty paint can.” Muraka­mi tells Ander­son that he “chose the Sin­foni­et­ta because that is not a pop­u­lar music at all. But after I pub­lished this book, the music became pop­u­lar in this coun­try… Mr. Sei­ji Oza­wa thanked me. His record has sold well.”

In addi­tion to being a world-famous con­duc­tor, the late Oza­wa was also, as it hap­pens, a per­son­al friend of Murakami’s; the two even pub­lished a book, Absolute­ly on Music, that tran­scribes a series of their con­ver­sa­tions about the for­mer’s voca­tion and the lat­ter’s avo­ca­tion, a dis­tinc­tion with an unclear bound­ary in Murakami’s case.

“I have lots of friends who love music, but Haru­ki takes it way beyond the bounds of san­i­ty,” writes Oza­wa, and indeed, Muraka­mi has always made music a part of his work, both in his process of cre­at­ing it and in its very con­tent. His books offer numer­ous ref­er­ences to West­ern pop (espe­cial­ly of the nine­teen-six­ties), jazz, and also clas­si­cal record­ings — fif­teen of which you can hear in the video from NTS radio above.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured NTS, the Lon­don-based online radio sta­tion known for its deep dives on themes from spir­i­tu­al jazz to Hunter S. Thomp­son, for its “Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day” broad­cast of music from his nov­els. Open­ing with Le mal du pays from Franz Liszt’s Années de pèleri­nage, the NTS Guide to Clas­si­cal Music from Muraka­mi Nov­els con­tin­ues on to “Vogel als Prophet” from Robert Schu­man­n’s Wald­szenen, and there­after includes  Beethoven’s Sym­pho­ny No. 7 In A Major, Mendelssohn’s Cleve­land Quar­tet, Wag­n­er’s Der Fliegende Hol­län­der, and much else besides. You may not be able to recall where you’ve seen all of these pieces men­tioned in Murakami’s work right away, but you’ll sure­ly rec­og­nize the Sin­foni­et­ta the moment it comes along.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day: Stream Sev­en Hours of Mix­es Col­lect­ing All the Jazz, Clas­si­cal & Clas­sic Amer­i­can Pop Music from His Nov­els

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

If you know noth­ing else about medieval Euro­pean illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, you sure­ly know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s great­est cul­tur­al trea­sures” com­ments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from oth­er man­u­scripts of the same peri­od by the qual­i­ty of its art­work and the sheer num­ber of illus­tra­tions that run through­out the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts schol­ars, but almost a mil­lion vis­i­tors to Dublin every year. “You sim­ply can’t trav­el to the cap­i­tal of Ire­land,” writes Book Riot’s Eri­ka Har­litz-Kern, “with­out the Book of Kells being men­tioned. And right­ful­ly so.”

The ancient mas­ter­piece is a stun­ning exam­ple of Hiber­no-Sax­on style, thought to have been com­posed on the Scot­tish island of Iona in 806, then trans­ferred to the monastery of Kells in Coun­ty Meath after a Viking raid (a sto­ry told in the mar­velous ani­mat­ed film The Secret of Kells). Con­sist­ing main­ly of copies of the four gospels, as well as index­es called “canon tables,” the man­u­script is believed to have been made pri­mar­i­ly for dis­play, not read­ing aloud, which is why “the images are elab­o­rate and detailed while the text is care­less­ly copied with entire words miss­ing or long pas­sages being repeat­ed.”

Its exquis­ite illu­mi­na­tions mark it as a cer­e­mo­ni­al object, and its “intri­ca­cies,” argue Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin pro­fes­sors Rachel Moss and Fáinche Ryan, “lead the mind along path­ways of the imag­i­na­tion…. You haven’t been to Ire­land unless you’ve seen the Book of Kells.” This may be so, but thank­ful­ly, in our dig­i­tal age, you need not go to Dublin to see this fab­u­lous his­tor­i­cal arti­fact, or a dig­i­ti­za­tion of it at least, entire­ly view­able at the online col­lec­tions of the Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library. (When you click on the pre­vi­ous link, make sure you scroll down the page.) The pages, orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured in 1990, “have recent­ly been res­canned,” Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library writes, using state-of-the-art imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy. These new dig­i­tal images offer the most accu­rate high-res­o­lu­tion images to date, pro­vid­ing an expe­ri­ence sec­ond only to view­ing the book in per­son.”

What makes the Book of Kells so spe­cial, repro­duced “in such var­ied places as Irish nation­al coinage and tat­toos?” asks Pro­fes­sors Moss and Ryan. “There is no one answer to these ques­tions.” In their free online course on the man­u­script, these two schol­ars of art his­to­ry and the­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly, do not attempt to “pro­vide defin­i­tive answers to the many ques­tions that sur­round it.” Instead, they illu­mi­nate its his­to­ry and many mean­ings to dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple, includ­ing, of course, the peo­ple of Ire­land. “For Irish peo­ple,” they explain in the course trail­er above, “it rep­re­sents a sense of pride, a tan­gi­ble link to a pos­i­tive time in Ireland’s past, reflect­ed through its unique art.”

But while the Book of Kells is still a mod­ern “sym­bol of Irish­ness,” it was made with mate­ri­als and tech­niques that fell out of use sev­er­al hun­dred years ago, and that were once spread far and wide across Europe, the Mid­dle East, and North Africa. In the video above, Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library con­ser­va­tor John Gillis shows us how the man­u­script was made using meth­ods that date back to the “devel­op­ment of the codex, or the book form.” This includes the use of parch­ment, in this case calf skin, a mate­r­i­al that remem­bers the anatom­i­cal fea­tures of the ani­mals from which it came, with mark­ings where tails, spines, and legs used to be.

The Book of Kells has weath­ered the cen­turies fair­ly well, thanks to care­ful preser­va­tion, but it’s also had per­haps five rebind­ings in its life­time. “In its orig­i­nal form,” notes Har­litz-Kern, the man­u­script “was both thick­er and larg­er. Thir­ty folios of the orig­i­nal man­u­script have been lost through the cen­turies and the edges of the exist­ing man­u­script were severe­ly trimmed dur­ing a rebind­ing in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.” It remains, nonethe­less, one of the most impres­sive arti­facts to come from the age of the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script, “described by some,” says Moss and Ryan, “as the most famous man­u­script in the world.” Find out why by see­ing it (vir­tu­al­ly) for your­self and learn­ing about it from the experts above.

For any­one inter­est­ed in get­ting a copy of The Book of Kells in a nice print for­mat, see The Book of Kells: Repro­duc­tions from the man­u­script in Trin­i­ty Col­lege, Dublin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Man­u­script, the Book of Kells

Dis­cov­er the Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script Les Très Rich­es Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Cal­en­dar” (1416)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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