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

in Art, Books, History | February 2nd, 2018

It takes no small amount of inquiry, from no few angles, to tru­ly under­stand a form of art. This goes even more so for forms of art with which most of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry have lit­tle direct expe­ri­ence. Take, for exam­ple, the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script: its his­to­ry stretch­es back to the fifth cen­tu­ry and it has arguably shaped all the forms of visu­al-tex­tu­al sto­ry­telling we enjoy today, yet sure­ly not one of a mil­lion of us under­stands how the arti­sans that made them did it.

The Pub­lic Domain Review did their bit to cor­rect this when they post­ed the illu­mi­nat­ed sketch­book of Stephan Schriber, a series of pages dat­ing from 1494 in which “ideas and lay­outs for illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts were tried out and skills devel­oped” by the author, a monk in the south­west of Ger­many. “The monk-artist pro­duced this sketch­book at the tail end of the 1,000-year age of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts,” write’s Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion, “a type of book pro­duc­tion that was to die out as the Renais­sance moved for­ward and the print­ing press took over.”

As print­ed books began to dis­place illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, the pro­duc­tion of the lat­ter went com­mer­cial, no longer pro­duced only by the hands of indi­vid­ual monks. But some of those monks, like Schriber, kept up their ded­i­ca­tion to the craft: “These pages show an artist try­ing out ani­mal motifs, prac­tic­ing curlicued embell­ish­ments, and draft­ing beau­ti­ful pre­sen­ta­tions of the cap­i­tal let­ters that would begin a sec­tion, page, or para­graph.”

Bib­liOdyssey points out that the book, “ded­i­cat­ed to Count Eber­hard (Eber­hard the beard­ed, lat­er first Duke) of Würt­tem­berg,” appears to be “a man­u­al of tem­plates and/or a prac­tice book con­tain­ing par­tial­ly com­plet­ed sketch­es, paint­ed and cal­lig­ra­phy ini­tals, stylised flo­ral dec­o­ra­tive motifs, plant foliage ten­drils, fan­tas­tic beast bor­der drol­leries” — yes, a real term from the field of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts — “togeth­er with some gold and sil­ver illu­mi­na­tion work.”

You can browse more images from Schriber’s sketch­book at this Flickr account, or you can have a look at each and every page at the Munich Dig­i­ti­Za­tion Cen­ter. The images repay close study not just for their own beau­ty, but for what their seem­ing­ly delib­er­ate incom­plete­ness reveals about how a mas­ter of man­u­script illu­mi­na­tions would go about com­pos­ing their art. Even the cre­ation of a form whose hey­day passed more than half a mil­len­ni­um ago has some­thing to teach us today.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review/Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid Dig­i­tized & Put Online by The Vat­i­can

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Illus­trat­ed in a Remark­able Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­script (c. 1450)

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

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

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Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voynich Manuscript: Has Modern Technology Finally Solved a Medieval Mystery?

in Books, Computer Science, History, Science | January 30th, 2018

What is it about the Voyn­ich Man­u­script—that cryp­tic, illus­trat­ed 15th cen­tu­ry text of unknown ori­gin and meaning—that has so fas­ci­nat­ed and obsessed schol­ars for cen­turies? Writ­ten in what appears to be an invent­ed lan­guage, with bizarre illus­tra­tions of oth­er­world­ly botany, mys­te­ri­ous cos­mol­o­gy, and strange anato­my, the book resem­bles oth­er pro­to-sci­en­tif­ic texts of the time, except for the fact that it is total­ly inde­ci­pher­able, “a cer­tain rid­dle of the Sphinx,” as one alchemist described it. The 240-page enig­ma inspires attempt after attempt by cryp­tol­o­gists, lin­guists, and his­to­ri­ans eager to under­stand its secrets—that is if it doesn’t turn out to be a too-clever Medieval joke.

One recent try, by Nicholas Gibbs, has per­haps not lived up to the hype. Anoth­er recent attempt by Stephen Bax, who wrote the short TED Ed les­son above, has also come in for its share of crit­i­cism. Giv­en the invest­ment of schol­ars since the 17th cen­tu­ry in crack­ing the Voyn­ich code, both of these efforts might jus­ti­fi­ably be called quite opti­mistic. The Voyn­ich may for­ev­er elude human under­stand­ing, though it was, pre­sum­ably, cre­at­ed by human hands. Per­haps it will take a machine to final­ly solve the puz­zle, an arti­fi­cial brain that can process more data than the com­bined efforts of every schol­ar who has ever applied their tal­ents to the text. Com­put­er sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta think so and claim to have cracked the Voyn­ich code with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI).

Com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor Greg Kon­drak and grad­u­ate stu­dent Bradley Hauer began their project by feed­ing a com­put­er pro­gram 400 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, tak­en from the “Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights.” While “they ini­tial­ly hypoth­e­sized that the Voyn­ich man­u­script was writ­ten in [ancient] Ara­bic,” reports Jen­nifer Pas­coe, “it turned out that the most like­ly lan­guage was [ancient] Hebrew.” (Pre­vi­ous guess­es, the CBC notes, “have ranged from a type of Latin to a deriva­tion of Sino-Tibetan.”) The next step involved deci­pher­ing the manuscript’s code. Kon­drak and Hauer dis­cov­ered that “the let­ters in each word… had been reordered. Vow­els had been dropped.” The the­o­ry seemed promis­ing, but the pair were unable to find any Hebrew schol­ars who would look at their find­ings.

With­out human exper­tise to guide them, they turned to anoth­er AI, whose results, we know, can be noto­ri­ous­ly unre­li­able. Nonethe­less, feed­ing the first sen­tence into Google trans­late yield­ed the fol­low­ing: “She made rec­om­men­da­tions to the priest, man of the house and me and peo­ple.” It’s at least gram­mat­i­cal, though Kon­drak admits “it’s a kind of strange sen­tence to start a man­u­script.” Oth­er analy­ses of the first sec­tion have turned up sev­er­al oth­er words, such as “farmer,” “light,” “air,” and “fire”—indeed the sci­en­tists have found 80 per­cent of the man­u­scrip­t’s words in ancient Hebrew dic­tio­nar­ies. Fig­ur­ing out how they fit togeth­er in a com­pre­hen­si­ble syn­tax has proven much more dif­fi­cult. Kon­drak and Hauer admit these results are ten­ta­tive, and may be wrong. With­out cor­rob­o­ra­tion from Hebrew experts, they are also unlike­ly to be tak­en very seri­ous­ly by the schol­ar­ly com­mu­ni­ty.

But the pri­ma­ry goal was not to trans­late the Voyn­ich but to use it as a means of cre­at­ing algo­rithms that could deci­pher ancient lan­guages. “Impor­tant­ly,” notes Giz­mo­do, “the researchers aren’t say­ing they’ve deci­phered the entire Voyn­ich man­u­script,” far from it. But they might have dis­cov­ered the keys that oth­ers may use to do so. Or they may—as have so many others—have been led down anoth­er blind alley, as one com­menter at IFL Sci­ence sug­gests, sar­cas­ti­cal­ly quot­ing the wise Bull­win­kle Moose: “This time for sure!”

You can find the Voyn­ich Man­u­script scanned at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book & Man­u­script Library. Copies can be pur­chased in book for­mat as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

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

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Harry Potter Finally Gets Translated Into Scots: Hear & Read Passages from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane

in Books | January 26th, 2018

In some­thing of a land­mark, Har­ry Pot­ter and The Sor­cer­er’s Stone has just been trans­lat­ed into its 80th lan­guage–Scots, a lan­guage spo­ken by 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple in Scot­land. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by J.K. Rowl­ing in Edin­burgh, the first Har­ry Pot­ter book was care­ful­ly trans­lat­ed by children’s author, writer, poet, edi­tor and trans­la­tor Matthew Fitt. You can see the first page of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Philoso­pher’s Stane above, and hear Fitt read sam­ples of the text in the NPR inter­view below. Due out on March 1, the book can be pre-ordered now.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.K. Rowl­ing Plot­ted Har­ry Pot­ter with a Hand-Drawn Spread­sheet

Down­load Two Har­ry Pot­ter Audio Books for Free (and Get the Rest of the Series for Cheap)

Take Free Online Cours­es at Hog­warts: Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts & More

30 Min­utes of Har­ry Pot­ter Sung in an Avant-Garde Fash­ion by UbuWeb’s Ken­neth Gold­smith

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Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Vinyl Collection and His Strange Literary Worlds

in Books, Literature, Music | January 12th, 2018

Haru­ki Muraka­mi read­ers, or even those of us who’ve just read about his nov­els, know to expect cer­tain things from his books: cats, ears, wells, strange par­al­lel real­i­ties, and above all music. And not just any music, but high­ly delib­er­ate selec­tions from the West­ern clas­si­cal, pop, and jazz canons, all no doubt pulled straight from the shelves of the writer’s vast per­son­al record library. That per­son­al library may well have grown a few records vaster today, giv­en that it’s Murakami’s 69th birth­day. To mark the occa­sion, we’ve round­ed up a few hit playlists of music from the Nor­we­gian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and 1Q84 author’s work as well as his life.

At the top of the post we have a Youtube playlist of songs from the artists fea­tured in Murakami’s non-fic­tion Por­trait in Jazz books, still, like most of his essay­is­tic writ­ing, untrans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. We orig­i­nal­ly high­light­ed it in a post on his for­mi­da­ble love of that most Amer­i­can of all musi­cal tra­di­tions, which got him run­ning a jazz bar in Tokyo years before he became a nov­el­ist. Just above, you’ll find a 96-song Spo­ti­fy playlist of the songs fea­tured in his nov­els, fea­tur­ing jazz record­ings by the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Elling­ton, and Thelo­nious Monk, the clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Haydn, and pop num­bers from the Beach Boys, Elvis Pres­ley, Hall and Oates, and Michael Jack­son.

Final­ly, you can close out this musi­cal Muraka­mi birth­day with the Spo­ti­fy playlist above of music from his own vinyl col­lec­tion — though at 3,350 songs in total, it will prob­a­bly extend the cel­e­bra­tion beyond a day. Even that lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence sure­ly rep­re­sents only a frac­tion of what Muraka­mi keeps on his shelves, all of it offer­ing poten­tial mate­r­i­al for his next inex­plic­a­bly grip­ping sto­ry. And though the Eng­lish-speak­ing world still awaits its trans­la­tion of Murakami’s lat­est nov­el Killing Com­menda­tore, which came out in Japan last year, you can hear the music it name-checks in the Youtube playlist below. Some­thing about the mix — Richard Strauss, Sheryl Crow, the Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet, Duran Duran — sug­gests we’re in for anoth­er Murakami­an read­ing expe­ri­ence indeed:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

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

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

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

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

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Notations: John Cage Publishes a Book of Graphic Musical Scores, Featuring Visualizations of Works by Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles & More (1969)

in Books, Music | January 10th, 2018

If you know just one piece by avant-garde com­pos­er and all-around ora­cle of inde­ter­mi­na­cy John Cage, you know 1952’s 4′33″, which con­sists, for that length of time, of no delib­er­ate­ly played sounds at all. You’d think that if any piece could be played with­out a score, Cage’s sig­na­ture com­po­si­tion could, but he did make sure to write one, and we fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago. Look at that score, of sorts, and you’ll sense that Cage had an inter­est not just in uncon­ven­tion­al music, but in equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al ways of notat­ing that music. Hence the Nota­tions project, Cage’s 1969 book col­lect­ing pieces of scores by 269 dif­fer­ent com­posers and accom­pa­ny­ing them with short texts.

Assem­bling the book from mate­ri­als archived at the Foun­da­tion for Con­tem­po­rary Arts, Cage did include a page of one of his own scores, though not that of 4′33″ but of Music of Changes, a piano piece he’d com­posed the year before it for his friend David Tudor.

Tudor, a pianist as well as a com­pos­er of exper­i­men­tal music in his own right, also gets a page in Nota­tions from his 1958 work Solo for Piano (Cage) for Inde­ter­mi­na­cy. Lest this sound like a too-neat struc­ture of reci­procity, rest assured that in the com­po­si­tion of the book’s text, as Cage explains in the book’s intro­duc­tion, inde­ter­mi­na­cy ruled, with “a process employ­ing I‑Ching chance oper­a­tions” dic­tat­ing the num­ber of words to be writ­ten, about which scores, and in what size and type­face as well.

Nota­tions, which also includes scores from the Bea­t­les, Leonard Bern­stein, Paul Bowles, Charles Ives (from whose archive Cage picked a blank piece of song paper), Gyor­gy Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, Igor Stravin­sky, Toru Takemit­su, and many oth­ers, inspired a more recent fol­low-up project called Nota­tions 21, which you can learn about in the video just below. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between musi­col­o­gist and com­pos­er There­sa Sauer and design­er Mike Per­ry, that 2009 book col­lects more than a hun­dred pieces of cre­ative nota­tion from some of the com­posers fea­tured in Cage’s orig­i­nal, but also many who weren’t com­pos­ing or indeed even alive in his day.

Nota­tions 21 stands as a tes­ta­ment to Cage’s endur­ing influ­ence as not just a com­pos­er but as the pro­mot­er of a world­view all about har­ness­ing the forces of chance to enrich our lives, and to put us in a clear­er frame of mind to see what comes next. “Musi­cal nota­tion is one of the most amaz­ing pic­ture-lan­guage inven­tions of the human ani­mal,” Ross Lee Finney writes in the text of the orig­i­nal Nota­tions. “It didn’t come into being of a moment but is the result of cen­turies of exper­i­men­ta­tion. It has nev­er been quite sat­is­fac­to­ry for the composer’s pur­pos­es and there­fore the exper­i­ment con­tin­ues.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

Watch Gyor­gy Ligeti’s Elec­tron­ic Mas­ter­piece Artiku­la­tion Get Brought to Life by Rain­er Wehinger’s Bril­liant Visu­al Score

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

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

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Introducing the Librarian Action Figure: The Caped Crusader Who Fights Against Anti-Intellectualism, Ignorance & Censorship Everywhere

in Books, Random | January 4th, 2018

We’ve fea­tured action fig­ures that pay trib­ute to some cul­tur­al icons like Edvard Munch, Vin­cent Van Gogh and Fri­da Kahlo. But now comes a new action fig­ure that hon­ors a less appre­ci­at­ed cul­tur­al force–all of the great librar­i­ans, those cru­saders for the print­ed and elec­tron­ic word, who “keep it all orga­nized for us and let us know about the best of it.” Stand­ing almost four inch­es tall and made of hard vinyl, the librar­i­an action fig­ure is based on Seat­tle librar­i­an Nan­cy Pearl. She has “a remov­able cape that sym­bol­izes how much of a hero a librar­i­an real­ly is.” The action fig­ure should come in handy in your own fights again anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism, cen­sor­ship and igno­rance. Enjoy!

via Boing Boing

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Before the Book­mo­bile: When Librar­i­ans Rode on Horse­back to Deliv­er Books to Rur­al Amer­i­cans Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion

Let Me Librar­i­an That for You: What Peo­ple Asked Librar­i­ans Before Google Came Along

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

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The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

in Books | January 1st, 2018


Cast as the star of 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie trav­eled to New Mex­i­co for the shoot, meet­ing with direc­tor Nico­las Roeg soon upon arrival. “I took with me hun­dreds and hun­dreds of books,” Bowie said to The Face mag­a­zine a few years lat­er. “And I had these cab­i­nets” — a mod­ern­ized Jacobean trav­el­ing library — “and they were rather like the box­es that ampli­fiers get packed up in, and I was going through all these books and they were pour­ing out all over the floor — there were just moun­tains of books. And Nick was sit­ting there watch­ing me and he said, ‘Your great prob­lem, David, is that you don’t read enough.’ ”

Due to Bowie’s hyper-seri­ous state of mind in those days, he went on to recall, “it did­n’t occur to me at the time that it was a joke.” Though he changed his ways of think­ing and even dropped the trav­el­ing library, Bowie seems to have main­tained his for­mi­da­ble read­ing habits for the rest of his life. (In 1987, he even posed for one of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s “READ” posters.) A few years ago we fea­tured his Top 100 Book List, whose vari­ety encom­pass­es every­thing from The Out­sider to Sex­u­al Per­son­ae to A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces.

“My dad was a beast of a read­er,” Bowie’s son Dun­can Jones, an avid Twit­ter user, tweet­ed last week. “One of his true loves was Peter Ackroyd’s sojourns into the his­to­ry of Britain & its cities. I’ve been feel­ing a build­ing sense of duty to go on the same lit­er­ary marathon in trib­ute to dad.” And so Jones’ infor­mal David Bowie book club begins with Ack­roy­d’s 1985 post­mod­ern nov­el Hawksmoor, which tells the par­al­lel sto­ries of an ear­ly 18th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don archi­tect and a late 20th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don detec­tive and which Joyce Car­ol Oates called “a wit­ty and macabre work of the imag­i­na­tion, intri­cate­ly plot­ted, obses­sive in its much-reit­er­at­ed con­cerns with mankind’s fall­en nature.”

Jones calls the book “an amuse cerveau before we get into the heavy stuff,” the “heavy stuff” pre­sum­ably includ­ing oth­er such Bowie picks as White Noise, A Clock­work Orange and Last Exit to Brook­lyn. If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate in the Jones-led dis­cus­sion of Hawksmoor on his Twit­ter page, you’ve got until the first of Feb­ru­ary to get it read. If you feel like you don’t read enough, con­sid­er this the Bowiest pos­si­ble way to ful­fill a new year’s res­o­lu­tion to do more of it.

Note: Sep­a­rate­ly you can also check out The Bowie Book Club Pod­cast where two friends spend a month read­ing a book on Bowie’s list. Find those episodes here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

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

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Invisible Cities Illustrated: Artist Illustrates Each and Every City in Italo Calvino’s Classic Novel

in Art, Books | December 28th, 2017

If you want to read a book about cities, you still can’t do much bet­ter than a slim, plot­less work of fic­tion by Ita­lo Calvi­no where­in the explor­er Mar­co Polo tells the emper­or Kublai Khan of what he’s seen in his trav­els across the world. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Ital­ian in 1972, Invis­i­ble Cities has inspired gen­er­a­tions of read­ers, hail­ing from all across the world them­selves, to think in entire­ly new ways not just about cities but about trav­el, place, per­cep­tion, real­i­ty, myth, and lit­er­a­ture itself. Though very much a work con­cerned with what’s seen only in the imag­i­na­tion, the book has also inspired artists to try their hand at ren­der­ing the 55 fic­ti­tious cities Polo describes with­in.

A few years ago we fea­tured “See­ing Calvi­no,” a joint effort by artists Matt Kish, Leighton Con­nor, Joe Kuth to illus­trate, among oth­er ele­ments of the Calvi­no canon, each and every one of Invis­i­ble Cities’ fan­tas­ti­cal, often impos­si­ble col­lec­tions of struc­tures, lives, and, ideas. More recent­ly, the Peru-based archi­tect and artist Kari­na Puente has, with her Invis­i­ble Cities Project, put her­self to work on a sim­i­lar endeav­or. Each of Puente’s intri­cate ren­der­ings takes about a week to pro­duce, and as she tells Arch­dai­ly, “they are not only drawn – I use dif­fer­ent types of paper and draw on each one before cut­ting them out with exac­to knives. All the draw­ings are com­posed of lay­ers of paper which are cut out and glued.”

At the top we have Puente’s city of Dorotea where, bear­ing in mind the rules of its infra­struc­tur­al divi­sion by gates, draw­bridges, and canals and those of the mar­riages between the trad­ing fam­i­lies that reside there, “you can then work from these facts until you learn every­thing you wish about the city in the past, present, and future.” In the mid­dle is Isaura, a city built on a deep sub­ter­ranean lake whose gods, “accord­ing to some peo­ple, live in the depths,” and to oth­ers live in the asso­ci­at­ed buck­ets, pump han­dles, wind­mill blades, pipes, and every oth­er built ele­ment of this “city that moves entire­ly upward.”

Just above you can see Zobei­de, laid out accord­ing to a series of dreams of “a woman run­ning at night through an unknown city,” pur­sued but nev­er found, altered to con­form to each dream until new arrivals “could not under­stand what drew these peo­ple to Zobei­de, this ugly city, this trap.” While at first Polo’s descrip­tions of the cities all across Khan’s empire may strike read­ers as com­plete­ly fan­tas­ti­cal, they’ll soon hear echoes of the places they live in in these metaphor­i­cal metrop­o­lis­es. And if they take a look at Puente’s illus­tra­tions as they read, they’ll see them as well.

Vis­it Puente’s Invis­i­ble Cities Project here.

via Arch­dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Three Artists Paint Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Hear Ita­lo Calvi­no Read Selec­tions From Invis­i­ble Cities, Mr. Palo­mar & Oth­er Enchant­i­ng Fic­tions

Expe­ri­ence Invis­i­ble Cities, an Inno­v­a­tive, Ita­lo Calvi­no-Inspired Opera Staged in LA’s Union Sta­tion

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Two Ita­lo Calvi­no Sto­ries: “The False Grand­moth­er” and “The Dis­tance from the Moon”

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

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

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