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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive ) |
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest Botanical Illustrator of All Time ) |
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 237juxtaposes 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.
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.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84features 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 aNew YorkTimes 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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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.
In 2013, the curators of the touring museum exhibit “David Bowie Is” released a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads, providing us with deeper insights into his literary tastes. Covering fiction and non-fiction, the list spans six decades, moving from Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945) to Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason(2008). As we once noted in another post, “his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from … Truman Capote to … Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Díaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov.” You can read the full list below, and, if you choose, also explore a related book from 2019–Bowie’s Bookshelf:The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life.
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