How Leonardo da Vinci Drew an Accurate Satellite Map of an Italian City (1502)

in Art, History, Maps, Math | April 16th, 2019

When I look at maps from cen­turies ago, I won­der how they could have been of any use. Not only were they filled with mytho­log­i­cal mon­sters and mytho­log­i­cal places, but the per­spec­tives most­ly served an aes­thet­ic design rather than a prac­ti­cal one. Of course, accu­ra­cy was hard to come by with­out the many map­ping tools we take for granted—some of them just in their infan­cy dur­ing the Renais­sance, and many more that would have seemed like out­landish mag­ic to near­ly every­one in 15th cen­tu­ry Europe.

Every­one, it some­times seems, but Leonar­do da Vin­ci, who antic­i­pat­ed and some­times steered the direc­tion of futur­is­tic pub­lic works tech­nol­o­gy. None of his fly­ing machines worked, and he could hard­ly have seen images tak­en from out­er space. But he clear­ly saw the prob­lem with con­tem­po­rary maps. The neces­si­ty of fix­ing them led to a 1502 aer­i­al image of Imo­la, Italy, drawn almost as accu­rate­ly as if he had been peer­ing at the city through a Google satel­lite cam­era.

“Leonar­do,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Vox video above, “need­ed to show Imo­la as an ichno­graph­ic map,” a term coined by ancient Roman engi­neer Vit­ru­vius to describe ground plan-style car­tog­ra­phy. No streets or build­ings are obscured, as they are in the maps drawn from the oblique per­spec­tive of a hill­top or moun­tain. Leonar­do under­took the project while employed as Cesare Borgia’s mil­i­tary engi­neer. “He was charged with help­ing Bor­gia become more aware of the town’s lay­out.” For this visu­al aid turned car­to­graph­ic mar­vel, he drew from the same source that inspired the ele­gant Vit­ru­vian Man.

While the vision­ary Roman builder could imag­ine a god’s eye view, it took some­one with Leonardo’s extra­or­di­nary per­spi­cac­i­ty and skill to actu­al­ly draw one, in a star­tling­ly accu­rate way. Did he do it with grit and mox­ie? Did he astral project thou­sands of miles above the city? Was he in con­tact with ancient aliens? No, he used geom­e­try, and a com­pass, the same means and instru­ments that allowed ancient sci­en­tists like Eratos­thenes to cal­cu­late the cir­cum­fer­ence of the earth, to with­in 200 miles, over 2000 years ago.

Leonar­do prob­a­bly also used an instru­ment called a bus­so­la, a device that mea­sures degrees inside a circle—like the one that sur­rounds his city map. Painstak­ing­ly record­ing the angles of each turn and inter­sec­tion in the town and mea­sur­ing their dis­tance from each oth­er would have giv­en him the data he need­ed to recre­ate the city as seen from above, using the bus­so­la to main­tain prop­er scale. Oth­er meth­ods would have been involved, all of them com­mon­ly avail­able to sur­vey­ors, builders, city plan­ners, and car­tog­ra­phers at the time. Leonar­do trust­ed the math, even though he could nev­er ver­i­fy it, but like the best map­mak­ers, he also want­ed to make some­thing beau­ti­ful.

It may be dif­fi­cult for his­to­ri­ans to deter­mine which inac­cu­ra­cies are due to mis­cal­cu­la­tion and which to delib­er­ate dis­tor­tion for some artis­tic pur­pose. But license or mis­takes aside, Leonardo’s map remains an aston­ish­ing feat, mark­ing a seis­mic shift from the geog­ra­phy of “myth and per­cep­tion” to one of “infor­ma­tion, drawn plain­ly.” There’s no telling if the arche­typ­al Renais­sance man would have liked where this path led, but if he lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry, he’d already have his mind trained on ideas that antic­i­pate tech­nol­o­gy hun­dreds of years in our future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Explains How the Ancient Greeks, Using Rea­son and Math, Fig­ured Out the Earth Isn’t Flat, Over 2,000 Years Ago

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Saw the World Dif­fer­ent­ly… Thanks to an Eye Dis­or­der, Says a New Sci­en­tif­ic Study

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

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

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Notre Dame Captured in an Early Photograph, 1838

in Architecture, History | April 15th, 2019

Accord­ing to Le Monde, the fire that rav­aged Notre Dame is now mer­ci­ful­ly under con­trol. Two thirds of the roof–and that beau­ti­ful spire–have been bad­ly dam­aged. The same like­ly goes for some pre­cious stained glass. But the two tow­ers still stand tall. And the struc­ture of the cathe­dral has been “saved and pre­served over­all,” reports the com­man­der of Paris’ fire­fight­ing brigade.

The pho­to above, tak­en by Louis Daguerre in 1838, helps pay visu­al trib­ute to Emmanuel Macron’s words tonight, “This his­to­ry is ours… I say to you very solemn­ly, this cathe­dral, we will rebuild it.” God­speed.

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The Charlie Chaplin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Photos & Documents from the Life of the Iconic Film Star

in Film, History | April 15th, 2019

Char­lie Chap­lin knew his movies were pop­u­lar, but could he have imag­ined that we’d still be watch­ing them now, as the 130th anniver­sary of his birth approach­es? And even if he could, he sure­ly would­n’t have guessed that even the mate­ri­als of his long work­ing life would draw great fas­ci­na­tion in the 21st cen­tu­ry — much less that they would be made instan­ta­neous­ly avail­able to the entire world on a site like the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive. A project of the Fon­dazione Cinete­ca di Bologna, which has pre­vi­ous­ly worked to restore and pre­serve Chap­lin’s fil­mog­ra­phy itself, it con­sti­tutes the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Chap­lin’s “very own and painstak­ing­ly pre­served pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al archives, from his ear­ly career on the Eng­lish stage to his final days in Switzer­land.”

This online archive includes every­thing from “the first hand­writ­ten notes of a sto­ry line to the shoot­ing of the film itself, stage by stage doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of the devel­op­ment of a film, or a project that nev­er even became a film,” as well as mate­ri­als not direct­ly relat­ed to the movies: “poems, lyrics, draw­ings, pro­grammes, con­tracts, let­ters, mag­a­zines, trav­el sou­venirs, com­ic books, car­toon strips, praise and crit­i­cism.”

The vast major­i­ty of these items have nev­er before been made pub­licly avail­able, and all of them enrich our pic­ture of the mak­er of clas­sic come­dies like Mod­ern Times, City Lights, and The Great Dic­ta­tor as well as the high­ly event­ful peri­ods of his­to­ry through which he lived.‘

You can explore the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive by plung­ing straight into its col­lec­tion of more than 4,000 images and near­ly 25,000 doc­u­ments, or you can enter through its curat­ed top­ic sec­tions: one on Chap­lin’s ear­ly career offers a glimpse into the hum­ble launch of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that would go on to tran­scend cul­tures and eras; anoth­er on music shows Chap­lin, who grew up in a musi­cal fam­i­ly with musi­cal ambi­tions of his own, con­duct­ing orches­tras; and a sec­tion on trav­el presents clip­pings and pho­tos relat­ed to his jour­neys to places like Bali and Japan, from which he returned on the same boat as Jean Cocteau. “Cocteau could not speak a word of Eng­lish,” Chap­lin wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy of the voy­age home. “Nei­ther could I speak French, but his sec­re­tary spoke a lit­tle Eng­lish, though not too well, and he act­ed as inter­preter for us.”

“That night we sat up into the small hours, dis­cussing our the­o­ries of life and art,” Chap­lin con­tin­ues, quot­ing Cocteau’s sec­re­tary thus: “Mr Cocteau… he say… you are a poet… of zer sun­shine… and he is a poet of zer night.” These words, in turn, appear quot­ed (along­side the sketch of Chap­lin by Cocteau above) on the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive’s “Chap­lin and Jean Cocteau” page, one of its con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed sto­ries. Oth­ers col­lect mate­r­i­al relat­ed to Chap­lin’s lux­u­ry-item pur­chas­es, Chap­lin as direc­tor, and Chap­lin’s final speech deliv­ered as the title char­ac­ter of The Great Dic­ta­tor, which a recent announce­ment about the archive calls “one of the most licensed ele­ments of Chaplin’s work in the 21st cen­tu­ry” — a time whose sur­re­al­i­ty Cocteau might well rec­og­nize, and whose absur­di­ty Chap­lin cer­tain­ly would.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Watch Char­lie Chap­lin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulterior Motive for Spreading Anti-Semitism in Rare 1940 Audio

in History, Literature | April 12th, 2019

Here’s a rare record­ing of the Ger­man writer Thomas Mann, author of Bud­den­brooks and The Mag­ic Moun­tain, explain­ing what he sees as the real rea­son behind the sys­tem­at­ic spread­ing of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many.

It’s from an NBC radio address Mann gave on March 9, 1940, while he was liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia. Mann had gone into exile from Ger­many in 1933, short­ly after Adolf Hitler was elect­ed chan­cel­lor and began seiz­ing dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers. The author had been an out­spo­ken crit­ic of the Nazi par­ty since its emer­gence in the ear­ly twen­ties.

In 1930, a year after he received the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, Mann gave a high-pro­file “Address to the Ger­mans: An Appeal to Rea­son,” in which he denounced the Nazis as bar­bar­ians. A Chris­t­ian man mar­ried to a Jew­ish woman, Mann often spoke against the Naz­i’s anti-Semi­tism, which he saw as part of a larg­er assault on the Mediter­ranean under­pin­nings of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion. In the radio address, Mann says:

The anti-semi­tism of today, the effi­cient though arti­fi­cial anti-Semi­tism of our tech­ni­cal age, is no object in itself. It is noth­ing but a wrench to unscrew, bit by bit, the whole machin­ery of our civ­i­liza­tion. Or, to use an up-to-date sim­i­le, Anti-Semi­tism is like a hand grenade tossed over the wall to work hav­oc and con­fu­sion in the camp of democ­ra­cy. That is its real and main pur­pose.

Lat­er in the speech, Mann argues that the Nazi attack on the Jews is “but a start­ing sig­nal for a gen­er­al dri­ve against the foun­da­tions of Chris­tian­i­ty, that human­i­tar­i­an creed for which we are for­ev­er indebt­ed to the peo­ple of the Holy Writ, orig­i­nat­ed in the old Mediter­ranean world. What we are wit­ness­ing today is noth­ing else than the ever recur­rent revolt of uncon­quered pagan instincts, protest­ing against the restric­tions imposed by the Ten Com­mand­ments.”

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!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared in our site in June 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

Redis­cov­ered: The First Amer­i­can Anti-Nazi Film, Banned by U.S. Cen­sors and For­got­ten for 80 Years

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

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See the Oldest Printed Advertisement in English: An Ad for a Book from 1476

in History | April 11th, 2019

Nobody pays much mind to adver­tis­ing, at least the hap­haz­ard kind of adver­tis­ing that clut­ters the space around us. But here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, when both that space and the ads that appear through­out it are as like­ly to be dig­i­tal as phys­i­cal, we might take a moment to look back at how the prac­tice of putting up notices to sell things began. In the Eng­lish lan­guage, it goes back to at least to the mid-fif­teenth cen­tu­ry — specif­i­cal­ly, to the year 1476, when Britain’s first print­er William Cax­ton pro­duced not just a man­u­al for priests called Sarum Pie (or the Ordi­nale ad usum Sarum), but eas­i­ly postable, play­ing card-sized adver­tise­ments for the book as well.

“This piece of paper, of which two copies sur­vive, is regard­ed as the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing print­ed adver­tise­ment in the Eng­lish lan­guage,” writes Erik Kwakkel at medieval­books. It states that Sarum Pie “is print­ed in the same let­ter type as the adver­tise­ment (‘enpryn­tid after the forme of this present let­tre,’ line 3). Even with­out hav­ing seen the new book, its key fea­ture, the type, can thus already be assessed.” This pio­neer­ing adver­tise­ment also “reas­sures poten­tial clients that the text of the hand­book is ‘tru­ly cor­rect’ (line 4) and that it can be acquired cheap­ly (‘he shal have them good chepe,’ lines 5–6). Both fea­tures will have been wel­comed by priests, the tar­get audi­ence, who need­ed their tex­tu­al tools to be flaw­less and did not have much mon­ey to spend on them.”

Kwakkel also gets into oth­er notable fea­tures of this decep­tive­ly sim­ple-look­ing pro­duc­tion, includ­ing “the pre­cise loca­tion of Caxton’s shop,” a warn­ing in Latin urg­ing read­ers not to remove the notice (“show­ing that it was put on dis­play some­where,” per­haps a church porch), and even the type. In both the adver­tise­ment and Sarum Pie itself, “the let­ter shapes lack ‘sharp­ness:’ fre­quent­ly ‘blobs’ and small hair­lines appear as let­ters, while an indi­vid­ual let­ter usu­al­ly has a vari­ety of appear­ances when looked at in detail,” pos­si­bly an attempt by the print­er to cre­ate “a more ‘gen­uine’ – i.e. tra­di­tion­al, ‘man­u­script’ – look.”

It would have been impor­tant back then to make print­ed books look hand-copied, since not so long before, all books were hand-copied by def­i­n­i­tion. With the first Guten­berg Bible still less than half a cen­tu­ry old, ear­ly print­ers had to make sure their rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive books did­n’t look like low-qual­i­ty sub­sti­tutes for the “real thing”; hence the assur­ances about both the type and the price in the text of Cax­ton’s adver­tise­ment. That the ori­gin of adver­tis­ing turns out to be close­ly con­nect­ed with reli­gion may come as a sur­prise — though giv­en the fact that the print rev­o­lu­tion itself began with a Bible, a prod­uct that in either phys­i­cal or dig­i­tal form now prac­ti­cal­ly sells itself, it may not be that big a sur­prise.

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 medieval­books

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

One of World’s Old­est Books Print­ed in Mul­ti-Col­or Now Opened & Dig­i­tized for the First Time

Watch the First Com­mer­cial Ever Shown on Amer­i­can TV, 1941

Sell & Spin: The His­to­ry of Adver­tis­ing, Nar­rat­ed by Dick Cavett (1999)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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New Augmented Reality App Celebrates Stories of Women Typically Omitted from U.S. History Textbooks

in History, Technology | April 10th, 2019

How do we know if we’ve lived through a major shift toward greater equal­i­ty? Maybe it’s when his­to­ry text­books start telling dif­fer­ent sto­ries than the ones they’ve always told about heroes in knee breech­es, waist­coats, epaulets, top hats, and beards. Aside from the occa­sion­al his­tor­i­cal fig­ure in bon­net or bloomers, most texts real­ly have just told “his sto­ry.”

In the U.S., at least, stud­ies show that only 11% of the sto­ries in his­to­ry text­books are about women. Is this because 50% of the pop­u­la­tion only con­tributed to 11% per­cent of the country’s events? No, even the kids know—like the kids in the video above from a new app called Lessons in Her­sto­ry—his­to­ry most­ly fea­tures men because “a lot of it was writ­ten by men and was most­ly all about men.”

Text­book mak­ers, and the school boards who give them march­ing orders, may stick to their guns, so to speak, but anoth­er major shift could ren­der their dic­tates irrel­e­vant. Smart­phone and tablet tech­nol­o­gy has become so famil­iar to today’s kids that instead of turn­ing the pages, they “swipe, like, in the his­to­ry books,” as one of the young­sters puts it.

Stu­dents stuck with the old patri­ar­chal ped­a­go­gies can eas­i­ly sup­ple­ment, enhance, or sub­sti­tute their edu­ca­tion with new media. While there are some seri­ous down­sides to this phe­nom­e­non, giv­en a dis­tinct lack of qual­i­ty con­trol online, the inter­net has also opened up innu­mer­able oppor­tu­ni­ties for telling the sto­ries of women in his­to­ry.

Lessons in Her­sto­ry, built by an orga­ni­za­tion called Daugh­ters of the Evo­lu­tion, takes a unique approach. Instead of sup­plant­i­ng text­books, it adds to them in an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty smart­phone app (cur­rent­ly designed for ios devices) stu­dents can point at pic­tures of his­tor­i­cal dudes to pull up sto­ries about a notable women from the same time.

Grant­ed, some of these women, like Har­ri­et Tub­man and Saca­gawea, had already been grant­ed access to the lim­it­ed space allot­ted female fig­ures in grade school text­books. But a great many oth­er peo­ple in the app have not. Fea­tur­ing a diverse selec­tion of 75 her­stor­i­cal women, Lessons in Her­sto­ry is the prod­uct of ad agency Good­by Sil­ver­stein & Part­ners’ chief cre­ative offi­cer Mar­garet John­son, who launched it at this year’s SXSW.

The app has pret­ty lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion at the moment. It works with one text­book, A His­to­ry of US, Book 5: Lib­er­ty for All? 1820–1860, and with a hand­ful of his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs on its web­site. (Many of the women fea­tured made their mark after 1860.) But with plans to expand and with the back­ing of a large ad agency, who may or may not have their own designs in mar­ket­ing Lessons in Her­sto­ry, it promis­es to make women’s his­to­ry more acces­si­ble to stu­dents who already spend more time star­ing at screens than pages.

“There’s a say­ing,” writes Cara Cur­tis at The Next Web, “’you can’t be what you can’t see.’” Apps like Lessons in Her­sto­ry, along with a num­ber of influ­en­tial books and web­sites for young peo­ple that nar­rate the past through the lens of women, indige­nous peo­ple, African-Amer­i­cans, artists, activists, work­ing peo­ple, and so on, show kids that no mat­ter who they are or where they come from, peo­ple who looked like them have always made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

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

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When the Nazis Declared War on Expressionist Art (1937)

in Art, Film, History | April 9th, 2019


The 1937 Nazi Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion dis­played the art of Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Georg Grosz, and many more inter­na­tion­al­ly famous mod­ernists with max­i­mum prej­u­dice. Ripped from the walls of Ger­man muse­ums, the 740 paint­ings and sculp­tures were thrown togeth­er in dis­ar­ray and sur­round­ed by deroga­to­ry graf­fi­ti and hell-house effects. Right down the street was the respectable Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion, designed as coun­ter­pro­gram­ming “to show the works that Hitler approved of—depicting stat­uesque blonde nudes along with ide­al­ized sol­diers and land­scapes,” writes Lucy Burns at the BBC.

View­ers were sup­posed to sneer and recoil at the mod­ern art, and most did, but whether they were gawk­ers, Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers, or art fans in mourn­ing, the exhib­it drew mas­sive crowds. Over a mil­lion peo­ple first attend­ed, three times more than saw the exhi­bi­tion of state-sanc­tioned art—or more specif­i­cal­ly, art sanc­tioned by Hitler the failed artist, who had endured watch­ing “the real­is­tic paint­ings of build­ings and land­scapes,” of stur­dy peas­ants and suf­fer­ing poets, “dis­missed by the art estab­lish­ment in favour of abstract and mod­ern styles.” The Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion “was his moment to get his revenge,” and he had it. Over a hun­dred artists were denounced as Bol­she­viks and Jews bent on cor­rupt­ing Ger­man puri­ty.

After­wards, thou­sands of works of art were destroyed or dis­ap­peared, as did many of their cre­ators. Many artists fled, many could not. Enraged by the eclipse of sen­ti­men­tal aca­d­e­m­ic styles and by his own igno­rance, Hitler railed against “works of art which can­not be under­stood in them­selves,” as he put it in a speech that sum­mer. These “will nev­er again find their way to the Ger­man peo­ple.” Many such quo­ta­tions sur­round­ed the offend­ing art. The 1993 doc­u­men­tary above, writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by David Gru­bin, tells the sto­ry of the exhi­bi­tion, which has in time proven Hitler’s great­est cul­ture war fol­ly. It accom­plished its imme­di­ate pur­pose, but as Jonathan Petropou­los, pro­fes­sor of Euro­pean His­to­ry at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege points out, “this art­work became more attrac­tive abroad…. I think that over the longer run it was good for mod­ern art to be viewed as some­thing that the Nazis detest­ed and hat­ed.”

Not every anti-Nazi crit­ic saw mod­ern art as sub­vert­ing fas­cism. Ten years after the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion, philoso­pher Theodor Adorno, him­self a refugee from Nazism, called Expres­sion­ism “a naïve aspect of lib­er­al trust­ful­ness,” on a con­tin­u­um between fas­cist tools like Futur­ism and “the ide­ol­o­gy of the cin­e­ma.” Nonethe­less, it was Hitler who most bore out Adorno’s gen­er­al obser­va­tion: “Taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence…. React­ing against itself, it rec­og­nizes its own lack of taste.” The hys­ter­i­cal per­for­mance of dis­gust sur­round­ing so-called “degen­er­ate art” turned the exhib­it into a sen­sa­tion, a block­buster that, if it did not prove the virtues of mod­ernism, showed many around the world that the Nazis were as crude, dim, and vicious as they alleged their sup­posed ene­mies to be.

In the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll see actu­al footage of the the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion, jux­ta­posed with film of a 1992 Berlin exhi­bi­tion of much of that for­mer­ly degen­er­ate art. Restaged Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tions have become very pop­u­lar in the art word, bring­ing togeth­er artists who need no fur­ther expo­sure, in order to his­tor­i­cal­ly reen­act, in some fash­ion, the expe­ri­ence of see­ing them all togeth­er for the first time. From a recent his­tor­i­cal review at New York’s Neue Gal­lerie to the dig­i­tal exhib­it at MoMA.org, degen­er­ate art ret­ro­spec­tives show, as Adorno wrote, that indeed “taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence.”

The orig­i­nal exhi­bi­tion “went on tour all over Ger­many,” writes Burns, “where it was seen by a mil­lion more peo­ple.” Thou­sands of ordi­nary Ger­mans who went to jeer at it were exposed to mod­ern art for the first time. Mil­lions more peo­ple have learned the names and styles of these artists by learn­ing about the his­to­ry of Nazism and its cult of pet­ti­ness and per­son­al revenge. Learn much more in the excel­lent doc­u­men­tary above and at our pre­vi­ous post on the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion.

Degen­er­ate Art — 1993, The Nazis vs. Expres­sion­ism will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Titan­ic: The Nazis Cre­ate a Mega-Bud­get Pro­pa­gan­da Film About the Ill-Fat­ed Ship … and Then Banned It (1943)

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

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

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Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

in History | April 9th, 2019

What­ev­er you think of the pre­dic­tive pow­er of tarot cards, the sto­ry of how human­i­ty has pro­duced them and put them to use pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the last 500 years or so. We’ve fea­tured a vari­ety of tarot decks here on Open Cul­ture, most­ly from the past cen­tu­ry: decks designed by Aleis­ter Crow­ley, Sal­vador Dalí, and H.R. Giger, as well as one fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from Twin Peaks. But today we give you the old­est extant exam­ple, and a high­ly dis­tinc­tive one for rea­sons not just his­tor­i­cal but aes­thet­ic: the Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, dat­ing from the ear­ly 1490s, which L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano’s Francesca Bez­zone describes as “78, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed cards, 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, engraved on card­board and hand paint­ed with tem­pera col­ors and gold.”

The Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, whose name derives from those of its last two own­ers Mar­quise Bus­ca and Count Sola, set a struc­tur­al prece­dent for decks to come by being divid­ed into those sets of major arcana (or “major secrets”) and minor arcana (or “minor secrets”).

In the cards of the major arcana, which trace the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, “Clas­si­cal and Bib­li­cal fig­ures take the place of tra­di­tion­al tarot illus­tra­tions: for instance, the arcana of jus­tice is Nero and that of the world is Neb­uchad­nez­zar. Among oth­ers rep­re­sent­ed Gaius Mar­ius, uncle of Juluis Cae­sar, and Bac­chus,” as well as now more dif­fi­cult-to-iden­ti­fy per­son­ages from lat­er cen­turies. The minor arcana cards, writes Bez­zone, “are also dif­fer­ent from all oth­er decks’, because they are fine­ly and rich­ly illus­trat­ed with scenes of dai­ly life.”

But even the every­day images con­tain secrets: “This is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in the suit of coins, which appar­ent­ly illus­trates the process of coin mint­ing, but in real­i­ty alludes to the com­plex and secret prac­tices of the Opus Alchemicum, that is, the method used to cre­ate the lapis philosopho­rum, the philosopher’s stone, alchemic instru­ment of immor­tal­i­ty and per­fec­tion.” But “in spite of the refined and del­i­cate artistry behind their illus­tra­tions, the name of the man, or men, who cre­at­ed them remained shroud­ed in dark­ness for cen­turies,” though in 1938 art his­to­ri­an Arthur Mayger Hind deter­mined that, based on the ref­er­ences to the Repub­lic of Venice in the deck­’s art­work, its was like­ly made for a Venet­ian client, pos­si­bly by the engraver Mat­tia Ser­rati da Cosan­dola or, accord­ing to anoth­er the­o­ry, the painter Nico­la di Mae­stro Anto­nio and his­to­ri­an Marin Sanudo.

Il seg­re­to dei seg­reti, an exhi­bi­tion on the Sola-Bus­ca deck at Milan’s Pina­cote­ca di Brera gallery, brings anoth­er Renais­sance fig­ure into the mix: “While large­ly unknown today, the Human­ist and Her­meti­cist Ludovi­co Laz­zarel­li from San Sev­eri­no Marche played a sig­nif­i­cant role in Ital­ian court Human­ism,” and because of “his per­son­al­i­ty, role, and inter­est in Her­met­ic and alchem­i­cal themes” as well as his rela­tions with pow­er­ful courts of the day “is believed to have designed the com­plex icono­graph­i­cal pro­gram of the Sola-Bus­ca tarots.” The tenets of Renais­sance Her­meti­cism held that mankind could trans­form nature by appre­hend­ing it, mak­ing it in some sense a fore­run­ner to mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. And while the notion that we can see our future in the turn of play­ing cards may not itself sound wild­ly sci­en­tif­ic, an arti­fact like the Sola-Bus­ca deck, all of whose 78 carts you can see here, still has more to teach us about our past. Decks can also be pur­chased online.

via L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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